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



## Mussels (Jul 31, 2018)

Any time i leave an image open for a few hours, i come back to see crazy RAM usage like this, has anyone else had this happen?

I usually only notice because it causes lag in other programs, then task manager reminds me i dared to leave a jpeg in a viewer


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## robot zombie (Jul 31, 2018)

Ooof. That's kind of impressive. I wonder what makes it do that.

I can't remember the last time I used Window's built in viewer. Always used infranview. Maybe not the prettiest but definitely one of the more stable and featured, not to mention light. Never looked back.


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## biffzinker (Jul 31, 2018)

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.


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## Mussels (Jul 31, 2018)

i had two open and lost 10GB of ram, but i couldnt load TPUcapture to get a snippet without closing one -.-


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## puma99dk| (Jul 31, 2018)

In my Windows 10 Pro the Photo viewer app will crash sometimes doesn't matter if it's my playback video it support or images it's annoying to be honest.

I properly have to say this is looking though images not just having one opened.


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## Toothless (Jul 31, 2018)

I'll open one and leave it open to see if I can get the same results.


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## biffzinker (Jul 31, 2018)

Would toggling its ability to run in the background help? 

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...ory-leak/3ab66be7-4d9c-4d67-b847-7347853dfcf5


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## Bill_Bright (Jul 31, 2018)

Running (viewing) an image now.

9:58:45 0% CPU, 175.2MB Memory.


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## Easy Rhino (Jul 31, 2018)

Leave it to microsoft to over complicate something like a photo viewer...


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## newtekie1 (Jul 31, 2018)

Just popped a jpg open in Photos, currently it is using 52.8MB.  I'm going to leave it open and I'll check back in an about an hour and see what it is using.


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## Deleted member 178884 (Jul 31, 2018)

I had that the other day, never noticed until I finished playing a game - I minimised it and it didn't close, went onto task manager and saw 24gb/32gb ram being used XD


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## Bill_Bright (Jul 31, 2018)

Easy Rhino said:


> Leave it to microsoft to over complicate something like a photo viewer...


Amazing how people automatically blame Microsoft when the problem has not even been identified.  Or at this point, even duplicated.

9:58:45 0% CPU, 175.2MB Memory
10:47:10 0% CPU, 173.2MB Memory - so ram usage has even gone down! (though I would suggest 2MB is negligible).


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## puma99dk| (Jul 31, 2018)

Bill_Bright said:


> Amazing how people automatically blame Microsoft when the problem has not even been identified.  Or at this point, even duplicated.
> 
> 9:58:45 0% CPU, 175.2MB Memory
> 10:47:10 0% CPU, 173.2MB Memory - so ram usage has even gone down! (though I would suggest 2MB is negligible).



We ain't testing with the same image and since there isn't 2 pc's that are the same we will always get different results.


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## qubit (Jul 31, 2018)

tsk tsk Mussels, what did I saw about looking at all that pron?


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## Easy Rhino (Jul 31, 2018)

Bill_Bright said:


> Amazing how people automatically blame Microsoft when the problem has not even been identified.  Or at this point, even duplicated.
> 
> 9:58:45 0% CPU, 175.2MB Memory
> 10:47:10 0% CPU, 173.2MB Memory - so ram usage has even gone down! (though I would suggest 2MB is negligible).



I'm referring to the App itself.


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## Bill_Bright (Jul 31, 2018)

puma99dk| said:


> We ain't testing with the same image and since there isn't 2 pc's that are the same we will always get different results.


Irrelevant. The image does not matter. It is static (not changing or animated) so the resources needed to display it should not change. So the issue is the viewing program and we are both using the same program.

And, assuming Mussels is using one of the systems indicated in his System Specs, he, like me, is using Windows 10 Pro. So same OS. 

Therefore, regardless the image, it should NOT continue to consume system resources. And on my system here, it is not.

10:16:19 0% CPU, 173.6MB Memory



Easy Rhino said:


> I'm referring to the App itself.


What difference does that make? It is a very easy, basic, and to your Microsoft comment,  uncomplicated program to use. It is not intended to be a graphics designer's or professional photographer's tool of choice.


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## newtekie1 (Jul 31, 2018)

It's been open 2 hours and still sitting at 48MB.


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## nomdeplume (Jul 31, 2018)

Thought I fixed this when I switched to the classic photo viewer.  Last week the W10 photo app accidentally got updated when I removed a restriction momentarily to update something else.  AV started popping up with all these requests for network access.  It uninstalled itself when I blocked its efforts through the third and final channel it tried to use.  Went to open a photo and there was no app, POOF!

So I reinstalled it through the M$ store and it resumed the same needy behaviors and RAM usage.  After I blocked it and switched to classic I forgot all about it.  Just opened a folder with 5 photos and clicked through them a half dozen times.  8% RAM usage.


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## Toothless (Jul 31, 2018)

Mine gets to about 1.5gb and starts to dump usage. Goes between 900mb and 1.5gb quite a bit.


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## eidairaman1 (Jul 31, 2018)

Bug report Microsoft


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## FordGT90Concept (Aug 1, 2018)

I opened a picture that is 2 MB in size.  Photos is using 432.6 MiB. I closed it and opened it again because that's ridiculous, 80 MiB now.  Same picture in ye olde mspaint is 81 MiB.  Same picture in Paint 3D is 114.5 MiB.  The picture is 3552 x 2000, 72 dpi, 24-bit color depth which comes to 21.312 MB of raw data, 28.416 MB if we include alpha color (which it most likely has in memory).  The memory consumption is stable for all three programs.


I wonder if your JPEG has malicious code in it or there's something specific about that picture that's causing an overflow.


Minimized? Maximized? Windowed?

I minimized it and it dropped to 70 MiB, now windowed again, it's up to 105 MiB.  I minimized and restored it a few times, it already crept up to 144.3 MiB shrinking a little but growing a lot on each cycle.


Can click "..." in the corner and "Send Feedback" to report the issue to Microsoft.


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## R-T-B (Aug 1, 2018)

Bill_Bright said:


> What difference does that make?



Customer preferences should always make a difference.

I'll use it the day I can zoom with the mousewheel.


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## Mussels (Aug 1, 2018)

the photo was a JPEG of my drivers licence i used for proof of ID for a rental application, might be relevant that i printed a copy of that document and then left it open?


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## AltCapwn (Aug 1, 2018)

Go into start menu then click "settings" (the gear icon), go into Privacy, Background apps and disable everything .

You won't have memory leak issue afterwards.


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## FordGT90Concept (Aug 1, 2018)

Mussels said:


> the photo was a JPEG of my drivers licence i used for proof of ID for a rental application, might be relevant that i printed a copy of that document and then left it open?


Or it might be GPU.  I left it open after it hit 144 MiB (from window/minimize/window/minimize) and it's slowly falling in memory use (down to 140.9 MiB now).

Since some are reporting it happening and some aren't, I wonder if it is a display driver issue, especially in NVIDIA drivers.  I run AMD here and I'm not seeing it.  Looks like 50/50 on NVIDIA cards above.  Could be a specific driver version causing the leak.


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## Bill_Bright (Aug 1, 2018)

R-T-B said:


> 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.


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## Solaris17 (Aug 1, 2018)

biffzinker said:


> 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


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## R-T-B (Aug 1, 2018)

Bill_Bright said:


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



Fair enough.


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## jboydgolfer (Aug 1, 2018)

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*


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## FordGT90Concept (Aug 1, 2018)

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.


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## grunt_408 (Aug 1, 2018)

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


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## DRDNA (Aug 1, 2018)

Solaris17 said:


> 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


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## grunt_408 (Aug 2, 2018)

It is a nope from me too


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## HD64G (Aug 2, 2018)

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.


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## Frick (Aug 2, 2018)

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).


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## Darnassus (Feb 9, 2019)

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


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## Mussels (Feb 9, 2019)

looks like the bug still exists :/


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## Darnassus (Feb 10, 2019)

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..


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## ImHere2makeOnePost (Feb 15, 2019)

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.


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## Flyordie (Feb 15, 2019)

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


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## Rixxz (Oct 18, 2019)

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)


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## Mussels (Oct 19, 2019)

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


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## Bonaducci (Oct 22, 2020)

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.


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## Frick (Oct 22, 2020)

Bonaducci said:


> 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?


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## biffzinker (Oct 22, 2020)

Bonaducci said:


> 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.


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## silentbogo (Oct 22, 2020)

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.


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## unclewebb (Oct 22, 2020)

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


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