macOS lagging when viewing entries with many media
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I’d like to report a performance issue that’s specific to the macOS app, related to entries containing a large number of media attachments (photos/videos). This makes entries with 20+ media files nearly unusable on Mac, even though the same entries work fine on iOS.
Devices & Versions
- macOS app: MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 2021, 16GB RAM), running the latest macOS and latest Day One app version. The issue is not tied to a specific version — I’ve observed it across recent updates.
- Comparison device: iPhone 15 Pro, latest Day One iOS app. Opening and scrolling the exact same entry on iOS is completely smooth — no lag at all. This strongly suggests the issue is specific to the macOS client’s rendering/memory handling, not a sync or server-side issue.
How lag scales with media count The lag is not a one-time threshold — it gets progressively worse as the number of media items in a single entry increases:
- New entry, no media: no lag at all.
- Up to 5 media items: performs fine.
- 10+ media items: starts to feel noticeably sluggish.
- 15–20 media items: hard to use.
- Close to the 30-media limit: the entry is nearly unopenable — I’m hesitant to even open it.
What triggers the lag
- It happens with both photos and videos — the media type doesn’t seem to matter, only the presence and count of media.
- It’s not limited to editing — simply viewing an existing entry that already contains many media files is just as laggy as editing one.
- When opening such an entry, thumbnails first appear blurry/low-res and take a noticeable amount of time to resolve into full clarity. Once all media has finished loading and rendering, subsequent scrolling within that same session is smooth a bit, but very become lagging again shortly.
Suspected cause (my own observation, not a confirmed diagnosis) While monitoring the Day One process in Activity Monitor, I noticed memory usage spikes from under 1GB to 5–6GB almost instantly when opening a media-heavy entry. This makes me suspect the macOS app may be loading and rendering all media in the entry into memory at once, rather than using lazy-loading / virtualization based on what’s actually visible in the viewport (i.e., only rendering media as it scrolls into view, and releasing/downsampling media that’s off-screen). If that’s the case, the memory footprint — and resulting UI lag — would scale roughly linearly with media count per entry, which matches what I’m seeing.
Steps to reproduce
- Create or open an entry with 25–30 media attachments (mix of photos and videos) on macOS.
- Observe: thumbnails render slowly/blurry, scrolling and interaction become sluggish, Day One’s memory usage in Activity Monitor jumps to 5-6GB+.
- Open the same entry on iOS (iPhone) — no lag observed.
Thanks for looking into this!
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