Some users are experiencing beachballs or lagging performance on their Macs on macOS 26.5, and it seems the culprit may be Apple Intelligence photo scanning in the background.

High battery usage also appears to be an issue for some of those seeing these symptoms …

I first started experiencing the problem myself yesterday, and when I checked Activity Monitor, one process was variously using anything from 50% up to 150%: mediaanalysisd. Googling this found a number of users complaining about the same issue, with others seeing high CPU usage also for kernel_task and corespotlightd.

The process mediaanalysisd relates to analysis of the photo library, with the consensus view suggesting that macOS is carrying out an AI analysis of photo content in the background. The only solution appears to be to connect to power overnight and let the machine get on with it.

Are you experiencing this issue? Please share in the comments.

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