Some Mac users are experiencing high battery usage or degraded performance, including seeing the dreaded beachball showing up while running macOS 26.5. As first reported by 9to5Mac, it may be due to Apple Intelligence scanning your photos in the background.
9to5Mac scribe Ben Lovejoy reports experiencing the performance hit recently. When he checked Activity Monitor, one process stood out as using anywhere rom 50% up to 150%. The process was named mediaanalysisd. When he Googled it, he found a number of users complaining about the same issue, with some users also seeing high CPU usage for the kernel_task and corespotlightd processes.
The process mediaanalysisd is relates to the analysis of the photo library, so some users suggest that it is macOS is performing an AI analysis of users’ photo content in the background.
I checked Activity Monitor on my M4 Mac mini running macOS 26.5, but did not see any of those three processes using outrageous amounts of my CPU’s cycles. That either means mine has already completed the scan, or that there may be one in my near future.
As for a solution to the issue, none has been discovered, Although leaving your Mac running and connected to power overnight will likely allow let the process to do its thing while you’re not using you Mac.
