Photo Shop Elements

I don't think upgrading to version 2018 would help, and it's easy to verify: install the free trial version and only buy if it's solving your problem.

Two possible issues:

- depending on your hardware (processor, RAM size) and the size of you photo library, the face recognition feature requires a lot of system resources to go through the initial indexing of the possible faces in all of your photos. That may run for many days.

- It's not impossible that the bug following the Windows 10 (1803) update plays a part here.  If you have not tried it, you can check your editor menu Edit >> Preferences >> performances. If you get the error message described in this paper, you'll have to edit the Windows registry.

Error: An integer between 50 and 8 is required | Elements | Windows 10

Anyway, it does not hurt to apply the registry edit to test even if there is no error message. Editing the registry is generally considered a danger, but here it is easy and quick, and there have not been any report of problems even if not strictly applied.

To test if the edit has been correctly applied, check with the menu of the editor:

Help >> System Information

Adobe Photoshop Elements Version: 16.0 (20170902.m.113423)  x64

Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit

Version: 10 or greater

System architecture: Intel CPU Family:6, Model:12, Stepping:3 with MMX, SSE Integer, SSE FP, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2, HyperThreading

Physical processor count: 2

Logical processor count: 4

Processor speed: 3093 MHz

Built-in memory: 8131 MB

Free memory: 3820 MB

Memory available to Photoshop Elements: 7303 MB

Memory used by Photoshop Elements: 75 %

Photoshop Elements scratch has async I/O enabled

Scratch volume(s):

  H:\, 1,46T, 738,7G free

  G:\, 195,3G, 194,8G free

In my case, after editing with 8 000 MB for my physical 8 GB RAM, I have now 7303 MB available, which is the double of what I had before the edit.