Replacement for Mac Photos that uses Affinity Photo

[rwillett]

Hi,

 

I'm looking for a replacement for Photos on Mac Sierra that uses or could use Affinity Photo. I've seen lots of replacements but none seem to integrate with Affinity Photo or Designer. After checking a number, it might be easier to go from Affinity Photo to a photo management system :)

 

Any suggestions please?

 

Rob

[MEB]

Hi Rob,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

There's an Affinity Photo extension for Apple Photos - called Edit in Affinity Photo - that lets you send an image from Apple Photos directly to Affinity Photo for editing and back. Don't know if you are aware of it?

Regarding integration with other software, if they offer an option to use an external editor, you can simply select Affinity Photo as the preferred application. If you want to use PSD as the exchange format go to Affinity Photo Preferences, General section and check Enable "Save" over imported PSD files, so the image can be sent back to the original application.

[v_kyr]

Well as MEB already said, the standard Apple Photos app on MacOS can make use of Affinity Photo via it's extension interface here. So you can call and use AP services here from inside of Photos. The other way around the Affinity apps themself don't offer any own integrations, beside the limited PS plugins interface of AP. - On a Mac for example the Pixave 2 image organizer can be used/setup to open the Affinity Photo app for image editing tasks etc.

[rwillett]

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I know Photo's can use Affinity Photo. 

 

The problem is Photos on Mac with Sierra is a problem for us. There is a major issue with the facial analysis program that runs off Photos. This causes our Mac to go into a reboot cycle 20-40 secs after it starts running. This is a reproducible error. We are down in the weeds at kernel level trying to turn off using launchctl com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist which also doesn't seem to work either (but it should!) 

 

We used to use Aperture until Apple binned it for Photos. Thanks Apple for throwing away a decent program.

 

We then moved to Affinity Photo and we have a lot of stuff now in Affinity Photo, however after upgrading to Sierra we now have the above problem. We can't downgrade back to El Capitan as we need Xcode 8.3 which is only available with Sierra. Xcode is the most important program we run as we develop mobile apps.

 

So the short summary is we have to use Sierra, we no longer have Aperture, we like Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo, we can't use Photos (we can't even start it up as it launches the facial recognition program), so we need a replacement to Photos.

 

We have looked at:

 

Lyn - OK but basic

Emulsion - Nice Beta but nowhere near ready to real work. e.g. you cannot easily rotate pictures, you have to work in radians which are displayed to 9 significant places. 

Unbound for Mac - OK but basic. We contacted the developer and he didn't recommend we brought it for our needs.

Capture One - Expensive

Adobe Lightroom - Probably the best but we're then tied into Adobe which we don't want. Mmm... Does Affinity Photo work with Lightroom? 

Picasa or rather Google Photos. - Don't really want to give Google all my photos.

 

Hope this clarifies things,

 

Rob

[Sharkey]

Using FRV as a browser works well after a bit of learning session.

 

Otherwise, basic use of 'Finder'. I know that Finder is old hat, but, with a little attention it can work remarkably well with virtually any file type.

 

I stay away from walled systems as much as I can. The import, export thing and file type change just wind me up.

 

Regards.   Sharkey

[v_kyr]

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I know Photo's can use Affinity Photo. 

 

The problem is Photos on Mac with Sierra is a problem for us. There is a major issue with the facial analysis program that runs off Photos. This causes our Mac to go into a reboot cycle 20-40 secs after it starts running. This is a reproducible error. We are down in the weeds at kernel level trying to turn off using launchctl com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist which also doesn't seem to work either (but it should!) 

 

We used to use Aperture until Apple binned it for Photos. Thanks Apple for throwing away a decent program.

 

We then moved to Affinity Photo and we have a lot of stuff now in Affinity Photo, however after upgrading to Sierra we now have the above problem. We can't downgrade back to El Capitan as we need Xcode 8.3 which is only available with Sierra. Xcode is the most important program we run as we develop mobile apps.

 

...

 

 

Hmm at least for the iPhotos app there was once a turnaround to disable face recognition via settings ...

defaults write com.apple.iPhoto PKFaceDetectionEnabled 0

... but sadly AFAIK they didn't took that over to Photos. Since I use still El Capitan here the latest Xcode version supporting that was v8.2.1. - As said before you can try Pixave, XNview MP, Luminar, On1 Photo 2017 etc. until Apple maybe fixes things for Photos under Sierra.

[harrym]

Would DxO optics pro work for you?

[rwillett]

Hmm at least for the iPhotos app there was once a turnaround to disable face recognition via settings ...

defaults write com.apple.iPhoto PKFaceDetectionEnabled 0

... but sadly AFAIK they didn't took that over to Photos. Since I use still El Capitan here the latest Xcode version supporting that was v8.2.1. - As said before you can try Pixave, XNview MP, Luminar, On1 Photo 2017 etc. until Apple maybe fixes things for Photos under Sierra.

 

That doesn't work any more, we tried that as well as editing removing the face detection daemon. Apple seems to have really screwed up launchctrl as well.

 

We're slowly working our way through alternatives. We have 50,000 photos, hundreds of videos adding up to around 400GB of stuff. Most of it is family stuff but there's a lot of stuff for work. 

 

We'll look and try. We did see a thread where Affinity said they were launching a DAM in 2016. That seems to have gone quiet. I wish they'd kill that thread off rather than l;et people hope for a decent DAM.

 

Thanks

 

Rob

[rwillett]

Using FRV as a browser works well after a bit of learning session.

 

Otherwise, basic use of 'Finder'. I know that Finder is old hat, but, with a little attention it can work remarkably well with virtually any file type.

 

I stay away from walled systems as much as I can. The import, export thing and file type change just wind me up.

 

Regards.   Sharkey

 

Thats possibly an option, we liked to have a bit more functionality though

[rwillett]

Would DxO optics pro work for you?

 

Not sure yet, it's on the list of things to test :)

 

Rob

[v_kyr]

...

The problem is Photos on Mac with Sierra is a problem for us. There is a major issue with the facial analysis program that runs off Photos. This causes our Mac to go into a reboot cycle 20-40 secs after it starts running. This is a reproducible error. We are down in the weeds at kernel level trying to turn off using launchctl com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist which also doesn't seem to work either (but it should!) 

 

...

 

Did you also tried:

sudo launchctl remove com.apple.photoanalysisd

?

[harrym]

Cool, the DAM side of it is pretty basic but it dies allow you to categorise/tag and prime is almost worth the price of entry alone!

(personally I do prefer C1 though when people are in the image)

 

Regards

[rwillett]

Did you also tried:

sudo launchctl remove com.apple.photoanalysisd

?

 

No we didn't try removing com.apple.photoanalysisd. We've already rebuilt our Mac twice with Carbon Copy Cloner as it screwed things up. We tried to disable it and it will not disable which is so frustrating. We're UNIX engineers and we know the Linux/Unix stuff well, but launchctl is a nightmare as its poorly documented and seems to change from version to version. 

 

We ran the program anyway and it didn't report an error. We're going to take a CCC backup as we now have the Mac back to a decent state again and will run Photos once we get the backup done.

 

We're slowly working our way through the various photo management software to see if there is a better application for what we want. We really like AP and would love to incorporate and keep it in our workflow.

 

I'll report back how the remove goes.

[rwillett]

Cool, the DAM side of it is pretty basic but it dies allow you to categorise/tag and prime is almost worth the price of entry alone!

(personally I do prefer C1 though when people are in the image)

 

Regards

 

We found a free copy of DXO Pro 9. Its nice but 'seems' to us to be for the initial workflow of taking hundreds of photos from a shoot, processing them and then making them ready for inclusion into a library. Nice piece of work though and its fast.

 

We couldn't seem to work out how to get Affinity Photo to round trip photos in and out, but we'll keep looking at it. We also now have a large list of software to quickly check i.e. Pixave, XNview MP, Luminar, On1 Photo 2017 :)

[anon1]

During the time you spend troubleshooting your mac and trying cheap software, you could have done so much work (i mean your main business) that it would easily surpass the cost of a decent software like capture one I guess :D

[rwillett]

During the time you spend troubleshooting your mac and trying cheap software, you could have done so much work (i mean your main business) that it would easily surpass the cost of a decent software like capture one I guess :D

 

I have spent £1,000's and possibly £10,000's of pounds over the last 30 years on commercial software that purports to do something well, to find it doesn't actually do what I want it to do. It's cost me more in time trying to bend a piece of software to try and make it work than to investigate what is the best software. My experience is that it's worth spending time up front trying to understand the way the software works, what support is available, what the alternatives are, does it fit in with how I'd like it to work, how quick is it with large amounts of data, does it support round trip editing, what video formats (if any) work? How does it integrate with other software. YMMV.

 

So I respectfully disagree that Capture One is the definitive answer to my problem. It might be, it might not be, I don't know. I'm happy to spend my weekend investigating what works and doesn't work as any software I do buy, be it £10 or £300 for photo management software, will probably be the one I use for the next 4-5 years. Moving 300-400GB of data is pretty easy, recreating the work inside it, less so.

 

I look through the Applications on my Mac and I can see a lot of stuff, some expensive, some less so that I brought but found out they didn't really work the way I wanted them to (or even work at all). There's some expensive stuff in there :(

 

Thanks

 

Rob

[anon1]

Lyn - OK but basic

Emulsion - Nice Beta but nowhere near ready to real work. e.g. you cannot easily rotate pictures, you have to work in radians which are displayed to 9 significant places. 

Unbound for Mac - OK but basic. We contacted the developer and he didn't recommend we brought it for our needs.

Capture One - Expensive

Adobe Lightroom - Probably the best but we're then tied into Adobe which we don't want. Mmm... Does Affinity Photo work with Lightroom? 

Picasa or rather Google Photos. - Don't really want to give Google all my photos.

 

though so because you did not name anything negative 

So I respectfully disagree that Capture One is the definitive answer to my problem. It might be, it might not be, I don't know. I'm happy to spend my weekend investigating what works and doesn't work as any software I do buy, be it £10 or £300 for photo management software, will probably be the one I use for the next 4-5 years. Moving 300-400GB of data is pretty easy, recreating the work inside it, less so.

 

 

 

IMO it is not the one software to use until the end of life, but it is decent and works, has great/ enough power 

[rwillett]

Did you also tried:

sudo launchctl remove com.apple.photoanalysisd

?

 

This doesn't work either. It seems as if some of Apples programs do not obey launchctl. Very, very frustrating!

[harrym]

Yeah, I think the 'round trip' part is going to be the issue.

 

Regards

[v_kyr]

This doesn't work either. It seems as if some of Apples programs do not obey launchctl. Very, very frustrating!

 

Somebody once suggested to ...

 

1. Disable System Integrity Protection (SIP)

2. Navigate to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PhotoAnalysis.framework/Versions/A/Support

3. Find the photoanalysisd file and move it to Trash

4. Empty Trash

5. Re-enable SIP

 

... but that's probably not the best desired way to get rid of the analysis process, which usually runs whether Photos is open or not. - See for example also the comments here.

 

I wonder that Apple didn't introduced so far a safe way to disable that processing, even they know a bunch of people has problems with that.

[R C-R]

This doesn't work either. It seems as if some of Apples programs do not obey launchctl. Very, very frustrating!

From what I have read after searching Apple's forums on "photoanalysisd" 

 

1. This daemon is a low priority process that uses the CPU only when Photos.app is not the frontmost app (so only when the app is either not open or is open but hidden or in the background).

 

2. It is a 'daughter' process of photolibraryd; if you kill that process, photoanalysisd will not restart. The path to photolibraryd is /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PhotoLibraryPrivate.framework/Versions/A/Support/photolibraryd

 

3. Supposedly, the following Terminal command will quit photoanalysisd and prevent it from appearing in future:

launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist

To reenable it use

launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.photoanalysisd.plist

 

4. Initially after installing Sierra, photoanalysisd will go through all the photos in the Photos.app library gathering facial recognition data. This can take hours to days depending on the number of photos in the library, the speed of the Mac, & what other apps are running. Once all photos have been scanned, it won't do anything again until new photos are added to the library.

 

5. photoanalysisd runs on laptop Macs only while they are running on AC power. I assume this is to preserve battery charge.

 

6. I did not find any reports of photoanalysisd causing app or system crashes (at least for unmodified installations of Sierra) but some users reported that according to Activity Monitor it used up to 150% or so of the CPU during the initial photo scan. (Activity Monitor reports CPU use per core so a 4 core CPU would max out at 400%.) Some of them said during this time this caused their Macs to perform sluggishly, suggesting its priority is not set low enough, but that is just speculation on my part.

 

Considering all of the above, it seems likely that either your installation of Sierra is somehow damaged & would benefit from being reinstalled, or there is some third party add on or system hack interfering with photoanalysisd, or possibly that the file system is corrupted enough that it is hanging when trying to scan some of the photos in the Photos library.

[v_kyr]

You can try out those bash scripts here (note that you may have to disable SIP first):

 

1. disable.sh

#!/bin/bash

# IMPORTANT: You will need to disable SIP aka Rootless in order to fully execute this script, you can reenable it after.
# WARNING: It might disable things that you may not like. Please double check the services in the TODISABLE vars.

# Get active services: launchctl list | grep -v "\-\t0"
# Find a service: grep -lR [service] /System/Library/Launch* /Library/Launch* ~/Library/LaunchAgents

# Agents to disable
TODISABLE=('com.apple.photoanalysisd')

for agent in "${TODISABLE[@]}"
do
    {
        sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist
        launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist
    } &> /dev/null
    sudo mv /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist.bak
    echo "[OK] Agent ${agent} disabled"
done

2. enable.sh

#!/bin/bash

# IMPORTANT: You will need to disable SIP aka Rootless in order to fully execute this script, you can reenable it after.
# WARNING: It might enable things that you may not like. Please double check the services in the TOENABLE vars.

# Get active services: launchctl list | grep -v "\-\t0"
# Find a service: grep -lR [service] /System/Library/Launch* /Library/Launch* ~/Library/LaunchAgents

# Agents to enable
TOENABLE=('com.apple.photoanalysisd')

for agent in "${TOENABLE[@]}"
do
    {
        sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist
        launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist
    } &> /dev/null
    sudo mv /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist.bak /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist
    echo "[OK] Agent ${agent} enabled"
done

3. If the above doesn't do it, try it the hard way by disabling and killing the deamon ...

launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd

launchctl kill -TERM gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd

[R C-R]

You don't have to search the web very hard to find lots of warnings about disabling SIP being a very bad idea, at least for any Mac used for anything besides as an isolated development platform for developers that really need to do that. I would never do it for a production machine & certainly not for any one I connected to the internet that was not carefully scrubbed of any & all personal information.

 

More importantly, if photoanalysisd is somehow actually causing the system or an app to crash (as opposed to just using a lot of CPU time while it scans photos) it is symptomatic of some issue that needs to be resolved, not sidestepped by killing that process.

[v_kyr]

Read carefully the posts in order, that's why I above wrote before ...

 

1. Disable System Integrity Protection (SIP)
...
5. Re-enable SIP

 

... and the shown scripts tell the same. That's mandantory otherwise you can't complete these steps, if SIP isn't temporary disabled. Afterwards he can again enable it, shouldn't be of a big deal here. Further the OP said "...We're UNIX engineers and we know the Linux/Unix stuff well...", so they should pretty much know all this to most degree themselves!

 

Related to photoanalysisd, well the OP has to check and see for himself what is the exact cause of all evil here for his system problems. It may be corrupted system recoveries or something else related here. However, if the OP has detected exactly those processes to be the problem and he has some 50,000 photos to be scanned here, that will take forever and probably slowing down the system even more than one is willing to wait just for a dump unstopable face recognition feature. So he might disable that in order to see if that will solve or delimit his problems in some way at all!

[R C-R]

Related to photoanalysisd, well the OP has to check and see for himself what is the exact cause of all evil here for his system problems.

How would the OP know for certain if photoanalysisd is causing the problem, whether or not disabling it changes anything? I am certainly no expert on this, but from what I have read, nobody outside of Apple is even sure what effects just temporarily disabling SIP might have on other parts of the OS.

 

As for the process itself, as I understand it it isn't just used for facial recognition. It is also trying to identify certain kinds of other things besides human faces, & to do so without remote processing like Google is doing with its picture service. How this might be integrated into other system services isn't clear, at least to me, which is part of the reason I wonder if disabling it is a good way to diagnose anything.