How to check, which Items are currently being uploaded to iCloud Photo in Photos 5.0 on Catalina

by: léonie

Last modified: Aug 30, 2020 2:30 AM

3 7584 Last modified Aug 30, 2020 2:30 AM

Sometimes Photos seems to be stuck and showing "Uploading ... 20 Photos" or similar for days, without any progress. this could be caused by a background process that is stuck, then it may help to restart the mac in Safe Mode to clear some caches, then restart normally (How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support).

But frequently it is a problem of some media item in the library, that is incompatible with Photos 5, or corrupted, or has permission problems and cannot be processed. Then we have to find this item.

Photos has a built-in method to show items that are unable to upload - just create a new smart album (File > New smart Album" and set the rule to "Photo is unable to upload". But this rule does not always show the problematic items. This album may be empty.

In Photos 5 we can also look into the library package at the file caches.

I am frequently seeing jpeg previews of the current upload in this cache inside the library (assuming the library is in the Pictures folder in the user home foleder and called "Photos Library.photoslibrary":

~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/resources/cpl/cloudsync.noindex/storage/filecache/

Be very careful, when you look into the library package, do not modify anything.

Select the library in the Finder, ctrl-click it or right-click it, then use the command "Show Package Contents".
In the Finder window that opens, click the folder "resources", then "cpl", then "cloudsync.noindex" > "storage" > "filecache". You may be seeing plenty of nested folders, and most of them will be empty.
To find the images in these nested folders use the "Find" command. Enter the key combination ⌘F, then set the search rule to "Kind > Image" (or video).

When an upload is in progress, I will usually see plenty of jpeg previews of the images, that are currently being uploaded. Unfortunately, we can only see the renamed, internal filenames created by Photos, not the original filenames we are seeing in the Info in Photos.

For example:

But this will give us an idea, which images need checking for a corruption.

If the library is small, or we are just trying to upload a few new photos, we can also look at the most recent photos on the webpage www.icloud.com and check, which photos already made it into iCloud. But this will not work for a very large library, if we are currently uploading the complete library.