Windows 10 photo viewer memory leak - Anyone else get this?

[Bill_Bright]

Customer preferences should always make a difference.

I agree. But my comment was in reply to the complaint that Microsoft made Photo viewer over-complicated. Not hardly.

 

[Solaris17]

Ah yes the new fangled Universal Windows apps. I thought you might of been referring to the older Photo Viewer from Windows 7. It's still present in Windows 10 but requires a regedit addition to re-associate ext types for the old viewer.

I thought I made a quick thread for this but it was just for getting the lock screen wallpapers, anyway, I knocked a script up that does this. I use it to get the old one back. If you are interested.

EDIT:: woops deleted it by accident

 

[R-T-B]

I agree. But my comment was in reply to the complaint that Microsoft made Photo viewer over-complicated. Not hardly.

Fair enough.

 

[jboydgolfer]

Personally I use the older versions for windows 7 over the new win10 ones, but im gonna try & replicate

edit:
ive found if you suspend the Photo viewer, then reopen, then suspend again, it slowly increases its used memory. i did it for about 3 minutes and it jumped from roughly 60MB to 100MB in that time frame. if left open for 60 minutes, that trend could get out of hand IF it continued.

after 5 minutes, & the mor you minimize , the more it increases , & faster, its almost tripled in this screenshot

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Yes, I observed the same thing. If you just leave it running it will shrink a bit or stay the same. When I closed it after hours, it was the same 140.9 MiB I reported previously. Granted, that's 60 MiB bigger than it started off.

Edit: Searching in Feedback Hub, there are mentions of this issue (maybe posted by somewhere here?). I upvoted them and added my own about memory footprint growing with minimize/restore.

 

[grunt_408]

I have pretty much the same system specs.. just opened a couple images. Will check back soon

 

[DRDNA]

I thought I made a quick thread for this but it was just for getting the lock screen wallpapers, anyway, I knocked a script up that does this. I use it to get the old one back. If you are interested.

EDIT:: woops deleted it by accident

did not work on my windows 10 home

 

[grunt_408]

It is a nope from me too

 

[HD64G]

Even not opening this app or any photo at all since the windows boot, it had 770MB RAM binded after 8 hours being stealth. Absurd imho.

 

[Frick]

Just opened three images: one moving gif, one medium sized jpg and one big jpg. Will leave for work in a bit and see what happens.


<END OF TURN>
Ok, some 10 hours later it still hovered around 200MB. Then I maximized/minimized the large jpg a bunch of times, and nothing really happened (it actually went down a bit). Then I zoomed in (double clicked) on the large jpg and I got this weird 2GB spike, but it lasted for about a second, and then it went down to 600MB where it has stayed no matter what I do.

...

It really doesn't like that 6000x9000 jpg. Every time I zoom it maxes out at at least 800MB. It doesn't do that with smaller (3840x2160).

 

[Darnassus]

This is a mad bump, sorry about this.. but yeah I've had this issue too. I had two images open, full screen, yet I had google chrome over the top of it, as well as Discord. I think over the space of 3-4 hours, I begun to realise my PC got sluggish..

Checked task manager and found 'Photos' was taking up over 9GB of ram.

Didn't get a picture, I went and clicked it instead and it instantly dropped..

after 30 mins

 

[Mussels]

looks like the bug still exists :/

 

[Darnassus]

Oh it REALLY does LOL

Took up 16GB it looks then got auto dumped over the course of an hour.

What a terrible memory leak.. this explains a LOT of my past issues..

 

[ImHere2makeOnePost]

I can confirm that the memory leak exists, I even had a picture of it taking a whole 14.8gigs of my 16gigs of ram, but thats lost to the depths of discord chats now. Anyways, It was specifically after leaving a picture from my art class open for a day or so while also tabbing into it periodically, leaving it zoomed in, and running it in the background while playing several games, namely Rainbow Six Siege, at one point I came back from getting lunch, tried to open steam to launch the game, and the whole PC was locking up hard as though its ram was full (which Ive experienced in the past with other PCs and know how to recognize at this point.) So naturally I opened up Task Manager and Resource monitor to see that I had less than 500mb of free ram and dropping by the minute, periodically dumbing about 400 or so mb to not crash. Task manager was reporting that Photos was the culprit frantically jumping around as it gained and dumped data.

If it helps, since someone in this thread mentioned it, I do use a NVIDIA GTX 1070 and its associated drivers though I doubt they would effect it as ram and vram are seperate (and the integrated graphics of my laptop would take priority on an application like photos thus seperate drivers).

Anyways, heres hoping it gets fixed at some point, in the mean time Ill just be sure to actually close my art files next time.

 

[Flyordie]

Had it.. but it resolved after bumping to 1809. Are you running 1803 or 1809?

 

[Rixxz]

Another megabump, found this thread after a Google search and just wanted to confirm that the leak still persists, even on Windows 1903, and it's incredibly annoying, it displaying a single 1920x1080 image causing it to consume pretty much all of my RAM after having been tabbed into a bunch of times over the course of a day. At first I thought it was my 3D renders pushing the system too hard, but nope, after a check in task manager it turned out to be the reference images.

The previous people mentioning it might be due to Nvidia drivers may be on to something, it's happening on my personal desktop with an RTX 2080, as well as my laptop at work with a GTX 1660Ti, but on my desktop at work with an AMD RX 5700XT it behaves just fine. Really strange that this hasn't been sorted out yet

(Should be noted that all three machines are running fresh installs of 1903)

 

[Mussels]

I've never managed to accidentally reproduce this (changed image viewers), sad that its still around :/

 

[Bonaducci]

I just came here to mention that the issue still persists, at least with most up to date build 1903 (I'm using delayed build updates due to bugs that are always found after new one comes).
In my case it was ridiculous 60GB RAM usage (including paging). It went from 75GB allocated to just 15GB after clowing MS Photos. Even funnier is that the picture was just 1.50KB gif with QR code I printed yesterday and forgot to close the window. Oddly enough I noticed 3 memory usage spikes. Two during the day playing some games when suddenly everything slowed down. I thought it was chrome but it was so slow, UI did not even react. After awhile finally chrome closed and everything was back to normal. This happened twice during the day and I assumed I just had some sketchy web page open which leaks memory (happens quite often actually, especially with Jenkins pages). Anyways, next morning the same story so I started checking what can it be.

Attached are photos when the problem happened and shortly after closing MS Photos. It was somehow able to allocate so much memory because I'm running quite a lot of swap and 32GB of RAM. I will also not notice it right away as swap is running on NVMe and is fast enough to be barely noticeable at first. That's how it was able to climb up to 75GB od memory allocated.
Resource manager was showing that almost all of the memory was modified (orange) and none was available.

 

[Frick]

I just came here to mention that the issue still persists, at least with most up to date build 1903 (I'm using delayed build updates due to bugs that are always found after new one comes).
In my case it was ridiculous 60GB RAM usage (including paging). It went from 75GB allocated to just 15GB after clowing MS Photos. Even funnier is that the picture was just 1.50KB gif with QR code I printed yesterday and forgot to close the window. Oddly enough I noticed 3 memory usage spikes. Two during the day playing some games when suddenly everything slowed down. I thought it was chrome but it was so slow, UI did not even react. After awhile finally chrome closed and everything was back to normal. This happened twice during the day and I assumed I just had some sketchy web page open which leaks memory (happens quite often actually, especially with Jenkins pages). Anyways, next morning the same story so I started checking what can it be.

Attached are photos when the problem happened and shortly after closing MS Photos. It was somehow able to allocate so much memory because I'm running quite a lot of swap and 32GB of RAM. I will also not notice it right away as swap is running on NVMe and is fast enough to be barely noticeable at first. That's how it was able to climb up to 75GB od memory allocated.
Resource manager was showing that almost all of the memory was modified (orange) and none was available.

So how long do you keep it open for it to do that?

 

[biffzinker]

I just came here to mention that the issue still persists, at least with most up to date build 1903 (I'm using delayed build updates due to bugs that are always found after new one comes).
In my case it was ridiculous 60GB RAM usage (including paging). It went from 75GB allocated to just 15GB after clowing MS Photos. Even funnier is that the picture was just 1.50KB gif with QR code I printed yesterday and forgot to close the window. Oddly enough I noticed 3 memory usage spikes. Two during the day playing some games when suddenly everything slowed down. I thought it was chrome but it was so slow, UI did not even react. After awhile finally chrome closed and everything was back to normal. This happened twice during the day and I assumed I just had some sketchy web page open which leaks memory (happens quite often actually, especially with Jenkins pages). Anyways, next morning the same story so I started checking what can it be.

Attached are photos when the problem happened and shortly after closing MS Photos. It was somehow able to allocate so much memory because I'm running quite a lot of swap and 32GB of RAM. I will also not notice it right away as swap is running on NVMe and is fast enough to be barely noticeable at first. That's how it was able to climb up to 75GB od memory allocated.
Resource manager was showing that almost all of the memory was modified (orange) and none was available.

If you go to Settings - Privacy - Background Apps you can toggle off certain Microsoft Apps from running in the background. Of course if you leave the app open then it will continue running.

 

[silentbogo]

Crap. It never happens when I'm trying to reproduce it....
But yeah, had this happen several times, though not as drastic (hangs before even reaching 3GB usage). Usually it either hangs right off the bat, or hangs when I scroll through a large folder with photos. I've noticed that it buffers everything you view, and there is a timed delay before it frees that buffer. Sometimes it doesn't. Not sure if leaving it running in background was ever the cause for me.

 

[unclewebb]

Holy crap! I never noticed this before. I have a 128 KB image that I opened up and then minimized to the task bar.

With the Task Manager opened up on the Processes tab, the Photos app keeps cycling. About every 10 seconds it shows 0 MB for a few seconds and then comes back gobbling up a bigger chunk of memory each time. Up to 411 MB and counting. Up and up and up.

Pretty sad when Microsoft cannot even successfully program an image viewing program. 452 MB and counting. Get this crap off my computer!

Edit - Same image opened with Irfanview and minimized, 3.2 MB.

Edit - Any poorly written Microsoft app like that has no business on my computer. Here is how to get rid of it.

How to uninstall Photo app in Windows 10

Original Title: Unwanted apps Hello Boys & Girls How can I rid myself of the app called 'Photos', I already have much better software on my computer and don't appreciate 'clever' software doing things

answers.microsoft.com