Photo's stuck on Catalina?

Come on Apple. If the curation process is getting hung up on a particular photo please move it to a special folder labeled "Unable to Curate" and be done with it. Waiting days for curation to complete without knowing why the delay is irresponsible on your part.

I had the same problem, with Photos stuck for days without much progress. Based on the suggestions in the threads below, I did the following, which worked:

1. I searched for .avi files in Photos and found out that some could not be played because the resources were no longer available. I deleted these files.
2. I repaired the Photos library — https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT204967. This took about 4 hours for a 85,000-item library.
3. Once it finished (a) repairing then (b) restoring the library it immediately started scanning the photos library again, which took about 10 hours to complete.
4. Once the photos in the library had all been scanned, it then started scanning people. You can quit Photos as it will scan the library in the background. You will see at least two active processes—photolibraryd and photoanalysisd. If you put your Mac to sleep or shut it down, the processes will resume without problems.
5. It will still prompt you to confirm faces in the People tab, and will continue curating and detecting duplicates in the background (check it under the Photos tab then choose Years, Months or Days to see the status of these processes).

HT210642

macOS Catalina 10.15.3

The macOS Catalina 10.15.3 update improves the stability, reliability, and security of your Mac, and is recommended for all users. 

• Optimizes gamma handling of low gray levels on Pro Display XDR for SDR workflows when using macOS
• Improves multi-stream video editing performance for HEVC and H.264-encoded 4K video on the MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)

Hve a nice day

It will depend on the size of your Photos Library, how long it will take to curate the library. How many photos and videos are in your library? And are the photos stored locally or in iCloud?

But you should be able to use Photos while it is curating the library. It is a background process, that will start over and over again, when you import or delete photos, crop a photo or change the Favorites mark. In my library the progress bar seems to be stuck at 80%. :"gathering favorites, detecting duplicates, curating best photos, composing layout, etc." may take several days, if your library is large. Photos needs to analyze each and every photo for the objects in the photos and to detect similar photos. SAhortly after it finished curating my 50000 photos, it started over, when I imported new photos.

Had the same problem. Photos stuck on 80-90 % for 4 days. 45000 photos and about 1100 videos in library. Today a had a little time to do some debugging. Noticed that I had 3 old avi movies in the video library that was not supported (i.e. they would not play). Deleted them from the library and voilá, Photos finished “curating....” in seconds. This worked for both my 2016 Macbook Pro and an older 2012 iMac that both had been stuck at the same percentage for 4 days. How I wish Apple would just put up an error message and tell me which files are the problem...

To open or not to open Photos Library.photoslibrary

I didn't venture into the Photos > Library with the command line. Given what many developers state about messing with the photos database, I left it well alone.

If you really want to do it, back it up then right click Library.photoslibrary and choose Show Package Contents. You can find more details at http://osxdaily.com/2017/02/23/where-photos-files-located-mac/ and https://www.fireebok.com/resource/can-not-open-photos-app-or-access-photo-library-on-macos.html.

You may also try PowerPhotos at https://fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/. I used it a lot in the past (I have to reinstall it but will need to look for the license).

Searching for video files the safe way…

With the main Photos library I used the search field in Photos to look for ".avi". The first time I searched Photos returned 21 files, where five of them were displayed as gray rectangles (clicking them would do nothing). I decided to delete them which is when it got interesting: after prompting for confirmation and clicking OK, there would be another gray rectangle displayed for the same file but with a shorter duration. Deleting the five .avi files resulted in 13 files (or segments of files) being deleted.

After doing this I repaired the Photos library — https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT204967.

But…

When I now search for .avi files in the search field it takes forever and a day and nothing is displayed. I worked around it by creating a smart folder ("Filename contains .avi") displays the video files, confirming that the damaged ones were deleted. Using the built-in Media Types > Videos displays both the .avi and .mov files and all are OK. Go figure.

TpGn70

User level:

Level 1

In response to Luminax-the-Chargekeeper

Had the same problem. Photos stuck on 80-90 % for 4 days. 45000 photos and about 1100 videos in library. Today a had a little time to do some debugging. Noticed that I had 3 old avi movies in the video library that was not supported (i.e. they would not play). Deleted them from the library and voilá, Photos finished “curating....” in seconds. This worked for both my 2016 Macbook Pro and an older 2012 iMac that both had been stuck at the same percentage for 4 days. How I wish Apple would just put up an error message and tell me which files are the problem...

Further to my earlier post, I've spoken again to Apple Support. Next step was to instal something to System Preferences, the downloaded file was named <MacPhotos.configprofile>, then from within Photos, generate a diagnostic report, which when complete was a 772MB file named <Photos-Diagnostics-T20200122-111930.tgz>.

The report was then uploaded to Apple, and according to the Apple Support representative, she will call me in a day or two.

IsabelPaz, regards your request that I share the MacPhotos.configprofile file, as much as I'd like to help, I'm uncomfortable sharing that file for a couple of reasons, one being I don't know what compromising info of my own I might be sharing, and the other is that Apple does not consent to distribution.

Opening the MacPhotos.configprofile file with a text editor provides this is an extract of text within:

The Photos, iCloud Photos, and CloudKit Diagnostics Profile generates files that allow Apple to troubleshoot issues with your macOS device and help Apple to improve Photos, iCloud Photos, CloudKit and related products and services. The generated log files may contain information that could be considered your personal information, including your location, IP address, crashlogs, iCloud account information, and photo metadata such as file names, the names of your shared albums, the names of people, and related information, including addresses, emails and phone numbers, from your contacts database locations, objects and scenes in your photos, and calendar events associated with your photos and memories, statistics about your photo library such as counts and titles of photos, moments, and the age of your photos, information related to each of your memories, the names of computers registered with your iCloud account and the full path names of your stored documents. This profile will expire after 14 days.

Also ...

By enabling this diagnostic tool and sending a copy of the generated files to Apple, you are consenting to Apples use of the content of such files in accordance with its privacy policy (http://www.apple.com/legal/privacy).

Apple Confidential Profile. Do not distribute. Not to be used or disclosed without permission from Apple. Copyright © 2019, Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

well mine just finished....

so I had 2 issues during this

1. Some video files that , once removed , helped it run a bit further. Easy enough to spot them by just hovering over them when autoplay was on though i only had a few hundred.
2. Unable to upload some files though it didnt tell me which ones (THIS ought to be something the process tells you rather than just sit there laughing at you
3. Running the repair took some odd pictures and marked them as unable to be uploaded - I exported them , deleted them then re-imported.

Restarted Photos and it finished ina few hours ..

So in my case Im pretty sure it saw some files as corrupt - the challenge is in identifying them - hope that helps someone...

I've been dealing with this same issue since release day of iOS 13 and Catalina. Like others, I've tried everything:

• Repaired library
• Deleted main library and then re-downloaded the entirety of my iCloud library
• Signed out of iCloud and back in
• Gone through every video, slow motion, etc.

My library is synchronized to multiple machines, all running Catalina. On some its on an external SSD, others its on the internal drive. Some are optimized, some have all images downloaded. On every machine, the progress bar has stopped at the same point. Additionally, my iPad Pro, iPad mini, and iPhone, are all stuck at the same point.

On a whim, decided to open another photo library that contained more photos and videos than my iCloud Photo Library....it finished curating in less than 8 hours.

Since I have the space on one SSD, I've decided to duplicate my iCloud Photo Library and see if it curates. If so, that would help isolate the issue to some sort of communication with iCloud. I'll report back on my findings.

Look for PDFs and DNGs! While 10.15.1 fixed mine, I had also done the following:

• look for broken files; these will show as a light grey square that cannot be opened and, when exported, is a file that preview cannot open (I had 4, 2 pictures from a GoPro and 2 videos)
• search for unsupported file types - it appears that iCloud and Photos support PDFs and especially DNGs - they preview and are readable, but the curation process does not like them one bit - after my library curated, I put 2 DNGs back in and the process jumped back to its frozen point and could not curate the DNGs.

the PDFs and DNG issue really threw me. The only way I even knew they were there was by option clicking the Photo library, choosing “show package contents”, then combing through the folders in the “originals” folders (note - DON’T delete directly from the originals folder; if you find a DNG or pdf, search for them IN PHOTOS and then delete that way.

Unfortunately there isn’t one SUPER easy way to find them, but after obsessing over this for a week I found a few things that might help.

• Smart Albums! Using Smart Albums helped a lot. I found in my library that the corrupted photos would often be missing metadata. So, I created smart albums to sort for items that had things, like “camera model” and “is empty” or “ISO” and “is empty”.
• Check iCloud online. When I would log in and look at my photos on iCloud to it would always state “x photos, x videos, 3 other”. The “other” was driving me mad, since there were no more blank pictures or videos...turns out, it was 3 PDFs.
• Force download and export originals. This was a huge help. I had my entires library on a 1tb SSD. I exported all originals to one folder, which made it easy to find: a) file types by sorting in finder, b) corrupted files (small or no preview) , and c) Photos gives an error log for files that it can’t export from the database (but oddly, it can export corrupted photos sometimes).

That is indeed strange. I was able to import and export photos during curation, but I was only doing it with photos in a folder on the desktop, not a card. Two thoughts:

1. Have you tried using Image Capture? I've always found it to be much more reliable than Photos. Perhaps you can import the card to the desktop, then import the items from there?
2. Have you tried importing the photos from the card with the card still in the camera (i.e., using the camera as the reader)?

Could be an issue with the camera and card with Catalina as well. What kind of camera and card are you using? Could also be another program interfering with Photos ability to read the card.

The video and audio formats supported on a Mac

There are just a handful of audio and video files that are recognized by a Macintosh computer. And that must be one of the reasons why not some users think of these machines as not very user-friendly. The video files supported on a Mac are as follows:

• QuickTime Movie - mov
• MPEG-4 - m4v, mp4
• MPEG-2, MPEG-1
• 3GPP, 3GPP2
• AVCHD
• AVI
• DV

There is no doubt that the best video format for a Mac is the native QuickTime file, MOV. This video file format is supported even by the earlier versions of the Mac OS. Alternately, the MPEG-4 format is the best one for the newest versions.

For audio file types that are playable on a Mac are the following:

• iTunes Audio - m4p, m4b, m4a, Core Audio - caf, MP3, AIFF, SD2, AU, WAV, AMR, SND.