macOS Catalina problems: Photos does not sync via iCloud

The only other thought I have had is that my iPhone is running iOS 12 and so has a lot of the old applications pre-“upgrade” (as reminders asked you to do). I wonder if this could be causing a bug... I haven’t played around with turning photo stream off on my Mac yet, I will give that a try and report back.

I have 96,000 pics and videos over the last 10 years. My MacBook Pro 16 was having major issues and they had to replace the logic board. Luckily I had a backup. I unhooked form iCloud and sent it in. I had a new hard drive and logic board. So a clean start. My photos would NOT download and it always seemed to get stuck on "updating". I followed Mpolda's advice and it seems to be working. it is slow AND, yes, it is much faster if you have the photos app closed. Hope that helps!

Lol - I’m in the escalation queue for a senior advisor with Apple Care. The fix

that I thought would work from yesterday doesn’t work. I’ve run help desks for a few Fortune 100’s and have gone through everything that we would have done in our protocols - and still nothing.....

Will update here regardless

I finally just bit the bullet and deleted the photo library and created a new one. It's currently downloading everything but the newest pictures downloaded first and the updating number is the same as what's on my phone and iPad so I'm cautiously optimistic this worked.

It would seem that Apple, in an effort to boost iCloud Storage Sales, has disabled Photo Stream, where photos taken on your phone were automatically added to the Photos library on your desktop. For the life of me, I don't see how this is possible now in Catalina. I have far too many to store in my free iCloud storage space, and have no intention of paying to store more. Files are being transferred to my other iOS devices, which is helpful, but not to my desktop, where I want them for permeate storage and archiving the most.

I'm working on other methods to transfer photos from my phone to my desktop computer, that don't involve Apple software.

I have the same problem. I recently bought a new MacBook Pro with Catalina preinstalled.

In the beginning, all my photos synced including new ones taken on the iPhone. Then it would stop syncing occasionally while it would still sync on my older MacBook Pro with Mojave installed (I refuse to upgrade to Catalina on that one). I've tried al the usual simple maneuvers and to no avail. This has been an ongoing issue with Apple products for the past several years. I always end up having to spend countless hours troubleshooting something. It never used to be that way. Apple products used to work seamlessly. I'm tired of this. Will start looking into options of getting out of the Apple ecosystem completely.

For months, I couldn’t get Catalina Photos to sync reliably all my photos from iCloud. I didn’t matter if I downloaded the full versions or not. I deleted the whole library, started over, set the machine so it wouldn’t go to sleep, etc. Eventually after a few days, it would stop updating and was really frustrating. I saw that many others had this problem too.

Another problem I had (unrelated to this photos problem, but keep reading) was that during boot, there was a long pause. Boot times took about 51 seconds on a 2015 MBP with a 2TB NVMe drive. Others booted up close to 20 seconds. This told me something was wrong. So, I set out to troubleshoot and see if I could fix it. My drive was using APFS. I thought it may be the install of Catalina so I made another install in parallel to my existing one. It did not fix the long boot times. Weird. Then I saw someone said that drives that were upgraded to APFS had some unknown problems and that when he completely wiped the drive and make a new APFS partition and installed Catalina it fixed his slow boot problems. What the ****, might as well try that and I did. BOOM! Fixed! Now my machines boots in 21 seconds every time. There must have been someone wrong with the file system that only a complete wipe/erase could fix. I also restored from a Time Machine backup.

Now, back to Photos. I did the same thing that I have always done with photos many times before and guess what? It works now. It updates reliably all the time - it’s been a couple weeks now. Photos does act a little wonky at times but most of the time when I open it now, it’s always up to date.

Sounds crazy, but maybe back up the machine, boot the Catalina install, completely erase the drive by showing all devices in Disk Utility. Erase the entire drive. Install Catalina. Do your restore if you want, set up photos and let it sync. It may now be fixed like it was for me. I wanted to share in case there was something in the actions I took to actually fix it. Hope this helps someone else.

Having the same issue. Photos not syncing since the update.

Update* - Albums eventually showed up okay.

Thank you for the update! I was waiting. Has anyone tried turning iCloud Photos off on their current library and then re-enabling it?

Same issue but on a Mac mini. Photos stopped syncing on iCloud the day I upgraded to Catalina. iPhone and iPad are in sync.

I am facing the same issue, no sync with Icloud despit new pictures or new deleted pictures, displaying "updating..." continuously

Trying this now! I'll get back with any outcomes!

I’ve tried it and while it synced a lot of the recent missing photos it has failed to keep my library up to date since the repair....

I’m having an identical issue with my 15” 2016 MBP.