A Better Fix for the PSE 12 Auto Analyzer

Posted by Barbara

I’m pleased to report that the PSE 12.1 update seems to have taken care of most of the performance issues with the Photoshop Elements 12 Auto Analyzer, at least on Macs. Since the update the auto analyzer does pop up again when you restart or log out and then back in to your account, but it only runs briefly and then disappears from Activity Monitor if the PSE Organizer isn’t running. More importantly, it doesn’t seem to be gobbling up resources even when it does run. I’ve kept it going for two days now and the most ram it ever used was about 46MB of real memory, less than, say, Dropbox uses when it’s idle. With the Organizer closed, it only got up to about 20 MB before it stopped.

So I would definitely say that while I don’t think Adobe specifically addressed this problem as part of the 12.1 update, something about the update does make a huge difference in performance. In its idle state, the whole Organizer now uses less memory than OS X Mail does when it’s not fetching or sending, so I would strongly encourage everyone to download the update and just forget about disabling the auto analyzer other than by the checkboxes in the Organizer preferences>Media Analysis.. That still doesn’t stop it completely, but it’s not running constantly the way it did before.

(For Windows, I never had the catalog/version set problem that some people had with converted catalogs, so no way to test there. If you use Windows and the update helped, I’d like to hear about it–you can contact me via the link at the upper right of this page.)

EDIT 3-15-14: I’m told by several people that the update does fix the version set problem in Windows, so that’s another good reason to go for it.

Once again, if you did rename the auto analyzer or put a space in its name, be sure to remove the space or rename it back before running the update, or it will fail. In Windows the update may run, but it may be overlooking anything to do with Auto Analyzer.

On either platform, if the update still fails, if you’ve installed the Adobe TWAIN plugin, put it back into Optional Plugins and try again. If the update succeeds, you can reinstall it.

If you’ve never installed TWAIN and never renamed the auto analyzer, or if the update still fails after fixing both of those, just uninstall/reinstall and it should work.

Adobe Updates PSE 12–Auto Analyzer Disablers, A Reminder

Posted by Barbara

Today Adobe released Photoshop Elements 12.1, which PSE 12 users can get by going to the Editor’s Help Menu>Updates.

A reminder to those who’ve disabled the Auto Analyzer by adding a space to the name: Go back and delete the space before running the update to be sure it can run properly. I don’t yet know if the update fixes the undead Auto Analyzer problem, but if it doesn’t, you can put the space back in again after updating.

EDIT In Windows, the update will usually run without doing this, but it’s probably skipping the auto analyzer when updating. While the space doesn’t prevent the rest of PSE from updating, it’s a good practice to put the space back, then turn the Auto Analyzer back off again afterwards.

On a Mac you’re likely to see Error U44M1P7  if you forget to remove the space and try to run the update. Put the Auto Analyzer’s name back to its original form, and the update should run.