When I restart GS, memory used is at 150 mb After 12 hours of running it is using 2.13 GB. In the hours in-between it is slowly increasing up to the 2.13 GB. Is this a leak and a problem? Do I need to reload GS? I am running 9.9.5 b5 but I am using 12.7.6 os because apple won’t update for a 2015 iMac. Numbers with a large spread sheet doing calculations only uses 377mb. I have 32 GB RAM
I imagine it is probably the image processing. Depending on whether you downsize your images to appropriately-scaled JPEGs before saving them into listings, GS will have to launch processes that make your uploaded images and thumbnails, for every saved listing as I understand it. Devices as old as the one you must be using have older graphics cards, and so (if I remember correctly) a lot of the image processing happens on the CPU, not the GPU. I also recall there was a memory leak in the old MacOS image processing libraries that made Lightroom and Photoshop balloon out, as well.
An inexpensive M1 machine can be amazingly peppy compared to the old ones. I remember when the repair cost for my wife’s (she was a professional photographer at this point) iMac desktop with 32 Gb and a last-generation intel chip was more than the cost of a then-brand new M2 mini plus a better third-party monitor.
Apple’s certified refurbished machines are excellent value for cost.
I am dropping JPEG pics straight off my Canon camera into garage sale, ~7 mb each pic
Yikes. Not only is that a bad experience for customers having to wait for those large images to process, but it takes up tons of space on your system and in the GS library. Highly recommend using JPEGmini to shrink the file size before adding them into GS. I made a very detailed post a week or two ago about my process and it fixed all the sluggishness that GS showed and sped up my listings a ton. Optimizing images for web consumption is still a thing, even though many people think the entire planet is on fiber! 
EDIT: I put about 10 images in most listings - some have 30 images. Images are about 200kb each, but still get shown at the max size eBay will allow, giving the most detail to customers who want it. The original images are much, much larger [I shoot RAW].
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I have around 10,000 listings in my GS library with 1,000 currently running on ebay, and each having at the least 10 pics and some up to 24, is there a way to reduce the size of all those listings pics?
Yes. [seriously I wrote a long post about this just a week or 2 ago as someone else for some reason puts TIFFs into GS and even uploads them to the GS image server [which thankfully converts them to jpegs, since TIFFs are not viewable inline by web browsers]. Doing the conversion ahead of time saves bandwidth for the transfer to whatever image service you use, plus also helps customers see the images faster.
I’ll find the thread and link it in just one second to this message…
which JPEGmini do you recommend? APP store lists over 100 jpeg converters , I quit counting at 110
Should I be shooting RAW, 1920 x 1280, 720 x 480? I can choose in my camera settings
Another option, which you should have because it’s included with MacOS, is to import the images into Photos, edit them (if you want; I crop and straighten and do a bit of bulk color correction), and then export them as JPEG from there. I export as JPEG, High Quality, Full Size and drop those into GS listings.
Once the images have been exported from Photos, I actually delete them. There’s a built-in 90-day “oops” built into Photos that will also allow recovering them from the Recently Deleted folder.
As an example, a photo I literally took an hour ago is (after editing and cropping in Photos) a 5.1Mb HEIC image from my phone, captured at 2347 × 2854. Exported, it’s 1.6 MB. If I export as Large Size, it turned out 446 KB and sized 1053 × 1280, which is more than enough for eBay listing.
Unless you are photographing text you intend to OCR (as I often do, since it saves time for me when I am listing a book and want a copy of its table of contents; I just copy-and-paste from the image in GS using the built-in MacOS OCR), you could easily save a 90% quality JPEG a little larger than the biggest eBay photo you want, and save loads of space.
example; the “small” version:
Which of course looks all muddy and warm here; I don’t really know why. Not on eBay!
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I shot this picture at 1600 x 1200.jpg and dropped into GS. I dropped it back out and GS changed it from 1.6mb to 566KB. So GS is resizing before I ever send to ebay
I use JPEGmini Pro, but you don’t need the Pro version as that introduces features I don’t use for eBay [video compression]. That’s the actual name of the program. https://jpegmini.com There’s a free trial on their website [I’m unsure there’s an App Store version]. The 100% free version limits you to 50 images a day [and now I see they’ve changed the different versions - there used to be a $39 non Pro version that didn’t do videos, but did everything else]. I’ve been using it for …gosh, 10+ years?
As mentioned in my original post, images are batch processed in Photos, then dragged into a folder where Hazel takes over - that removes the GPS and other metadata, adds my copyright data [all of this, including GPS data, is viewable on eBay in the photos that are part of the listing description- one can browse to any seller and find out what camera they used, where they live, etc, which I find to be too creepy, hence why I do this extra processing], then get resized, then dumped into a different folder where the last Hazel step calls JPEGmini to process the images; on a batch of 10-30 images, this takes maybe 1 second - takes Finder longer to re-render the image thumbnail in List Mode than it does to do the processing].
As my original post stated, I use RetroBatch to do the metadata and resizing stuff, but you can simply choose not to have GPS data exported when you drag/export images out of Photos - plus you can export images at a different size if you want; then just drag into JPEGmini and done [there are a few options in that app - I have it set to overwrite the original file since the true original lives in Photos].
Just a heads up, but that is actually 30 days. I do the same though. I delete from Photos after exporting. I figure I have a copy in many, many places - the deleted copy still gets backed up via Time Machine and Backblaze, the mini-fied copy lives in GS plus on my WebDAV server [and I do delete them from Finder and empty the trash at the end of the day, so Time Machine has a copy before I delete them there too]. That’s why I like the smaller sizes.
For my photography business, I do keep the RAW files, unaltered, in multiple locations for backup and DAM purposes. That’s an entirely different workflow for me, as it doesn’t involve eBay.
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Yeah, that depends on your settings in GS - under the eBay→eBay Images settings. If you have set the max size of 1600x1200 then it will shrink [but it compresses too - that’s why I do my processing ahead of time as I want the sharpest image possible and give no reason for GS to alter my image - so RetroBatch is setup to crop to a 1600x1600 square so that everything fits w/o needing to be processed further by GS].
To answer your earlier question - I would shoot at the highest resolution you can, in case you need to crop any images to zoom into details in post [“zoom and enhance”], as that gives you the most pixels to work with. Then resize to the max supported by whatever image server you’re using [for me that’s 1600x1200]. I used to keep them at “Original Size” but even with JPEGmini processing them, GS can not handle the original size and renders the preview very blurry when in preview mode in GS; this makes it hard to tell for me if I have a defective photo that is not focused, or if it’s just GS doing its thing; the devs for GS suggested here to me to use the max 1600x1200 to get around that bug; and so far that’s worked great, plus it has sped up GS a lot for me].
Regarding the 2015 Mac - until mid 2023, I used an 11” 2015 MacBook Air Core i7 with 8GB RAM [max it could have] and a 1TB SSD, connected to an external monitor. Performance was actually quite good. To continue to get security and OS updates on that machine, I use OpenCore Legacy Patcher. That allows me to have macOS 15 on that system and for me, that works great. I don’t use GS on it any more, but I do use other modern apps, and they have all run smoothly for me.
I did get a $500 M1 MacBook Air in March 2024 [walmart special] that has 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, and it is crazy fast; even with just 8GB - like the 11” Air, I could run many apps at once and not see a slowdown. That system is setup with GS to sync, but due to my limited bandwidth, I have not had a successful sync In many months. Hopefully when fiber gets turned on for me, I can revisit that.
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Wow, that is some fast compression! Problem is the 50 limit.
Yeah, the 50 limit is after the 7 day trial is over; you can do as many as you want until then. They’ve changed their pricing since I first bought it as it was $39 for Standard and $59 for Pro if I recall correctly. Now they just have Pro and a Pro Suite [the suite is handy for those that use Adobe or Capture One].
I can only speak for myself, but I’ve been very happy with the product. I’ve not upgraded every year; only when an OS update made the app not work as well.
I know there are free tools out there too - many open source ones. If you want to give JPEGmini a try for 7 days with a bunch of samples you can and then compare to the other ones. A few others I’ve played with in the past [and may be just as good as JPEGmini is now] are:
https://image-compressor.github.io [there is a Mac download - click on the available on all platforms button at the top and then look for x64.dmg for Intel Macs, and aarch64.dmg for Apple Silicon]
all of the above are free, open source Mac apps. ImageOptim has older versions available that work on macOS 10.10 and above while the current version requires macOS 11+
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(this is giving me flashbacks to the days when we had to reduce the palette size in a 72 dpi PNG file so it would download faster from the World Wide Web over a modem)
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I have to find a way to get rid of the beach ball of death. It is getting to be 2 seconds while scrolling between listings. Without spending for a new computer
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We should check with the developers (time zone differences) but it sure sounds like
- creating the image thumbnails for the view
- updating Smart Groups because whenever you change views they probably update every entry
- some other background process involving “did you change something” when you move away from a listing, which probably also could benefit from database reduction
- too much trash?
@rlmartin About the 10000 listings: Are they only there for record keeping, or are they inventory that is set aside for now? The other thing it could be is just a huge backlog of database records that are not actually useful for daily work.
Advice would depend on whether you sell commodities or unique items. But….
If they’re all unique, and they’re sold, how often do you actually examine sold items? I have found that for record keeping I can select old/sold listings (more than 3 months ago), and [with option key pressed] select File > Export 1000 Listings as Separate Files (depending on how many have been selected). Once they’ve been exported to an external backup, I can delete them and empty the trash, and GS is always much happier and faster.
That helps both the database performance generally, and also the Smart Group updating.
Much of my inventory (antiques) is a once in 5 year sale and unique in condition. The 9,000 listings that aren’t running is purely for, I sold it for $? in 2019 and it was in this condition, and this was my title and description (the last 2 are killers of time when making a brand new unique listing). When I start a new listing I look in my listings for an old one are similar one and build from there. 80% of the time photos are reshot and old ones are dumped. 3 years ago I threw away all but 1 picture and that helped massively but took many days to do it.
My trash file is 0
Quick question on your last point - removing images. Can you select stuff you sold long ago, en mass [eg: select a range], and then from the Listing menu, under Images, select “Remove all images…”?
Or did it take you days because you had to review the listings before you removed the images? If not, then a smart collection based on age, could give you the ability to quickly filter 5 year old sold listings, to remove images from. Just an idea. You may be keeping those so you can better ID similar new inventory as you stated.