Photo's stuck on Catalina?

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...

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).

Okay, folks. After letting my iMac Pro with Catalina run for three days with the new photos app continuing to curate the photos with little progress, I discovered the immediate solution, at least for my system. The photos app, for some unknown reason, was using a photo library that it was not supposed to be using. Actually was using the Lightroom photo library for some reason. Do not know why. I restarted the photos app while holding the option key, and selected the correct photo library, and magically it was back to normal without the continuous "curating". Glad that is over. So, check to see which photo library your system is trying to "curate". Good luck.

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.

Hi,

it is not about finding the ''many old photos from 20 years ago without metadata'', it is about that very high probability that the corrupted photos are among the ones with missing metadata. That helps you by narrowing down the number of photos you have to search through.

If you verified all the photos and videos, did you check for other type of files like pdf and dng?

On page 6, the MutantSquid has a suggestion for that.

Quoting MutantSquid:

1.

''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. ''

2.

''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). ''

Best of luck !!

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.

The process kicked off to analyse, curate and remove duplication in photos is a bit illusive.

It only starts if your device is connected to mains power when using MacBooks. It seems to start when selecting the 'Years' view option at the top of the photo's screen.

It seems to be coupled to the sync to iCloud process. Im using the option to store all photos in iCloud and share the repository between a number of apple devices.

When a lot of photos have been uploaded to the iCloud the 'gathering..' process can take a long time. For me it lasted for more than a day, but I was amazed that it did pick up and deleted nearly all duplicates.

All I can say is let it run undisturbed , switch auto out off to keep photos running and the process can finish

I know you've already searched your library, but you most likely have a damaged file, or one that the curation process cannot read, but Photos can display. Most of this has been written about before, but in summation:

1) Have you logged into iCloud and verified that the photo and video count match? When I did this, I found that iCloud listed 3 "other files" that Photos did not. These were PDFs that the curation process couldn't process.

2) Have you tried Smart Albums set to look for specific metadata that is empty? I.e. "Camera model" and "is empty" to help narrow down your library and pinpoint a file that is damaged.

3) Have you verified that all your videos can actually play and are not a damaged thumbnail? A fast way to this is to export only your videos.

4) Have you tried exporting your library to another drive to see if anything a) can't be exported and generates an error, and b) allows you to check if you have a filetype in there that the curation process can't handle (for example, a DNG, that was created when I was playing around with Lightroom).

I found that repairing the library multiple times didn't find or fix the problem files...it just wasted a ton of time waiting for the library to re-upload each file and rescan the people library. Neither did creating a fresh library and downloading all files from iCloud.

Good luck! I know it's of little help, but once you find the file that is causing you the problem, it should finish in less than 30 minutes.

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...

Hi there.

I can confirm that I had this problem too and I tried searching for old unsupported AVI files (i.e. the thumbnail didn't work or the video didn't play, but I didn't have any videos that fell into this category).

I then searched for AVI files in general (just search .avi in the photos search box) and this identified 6 files all of which play perfectly fine in photos or in QuickTime player.

I exported these 6 files onto my desktop and then deleted them from the photos library and the curation then worked within about 5 minutes.

As such, even if you have AVI files that are working, it might be worth backing these up and then deleting them from the library to see if that works.

Hope this helps others!

Hi.

Curation Complete !!

The problem, as earlier suggested, were corrupted photos in the library that the curation process could not read.

As above written, I have search for Photos that hat no ISO or Camera Model Info in the Metadata. I have found a few, but the ``Analysing... ``was still going. My Library has around 82.000 Photos and Videos.

Adding the Permissions to ``Administrators`` and ``Apply to enclosed items...`` + a restart, did not do anything. ``Analysing,..``was still going.

Today I have decided to take one by one the Photos in the Library (All Photos - view) and to my surprise I have still found a few. All of them were taken in 2014-2015. Back then I had my old iPhone 5s. After deleting these, the Curation was in a few minutes complete.

Needless to say that my iMac, late 2013, was always on since mid of November..., hoping that it would finish by itself... no it doesn't.

For those that have tried everything and the process is still not finished, my suggestion is that you should search manually for the corrupted Photos.

Thanks to everyone that wrote here trying to help us!

"I restarted the photos app while holding the option key, and selected the correct photo library, and magically it was back to normal without the continuous "curating". "

THANK YOU for the fix. After a normal launch of a new iMac, for no particular reason it diverted to an old iPhoto library and started the infinite "curating" cycle. Selecting the Photo library restored over two years of "missing" photos and stopped the "curating" foolishness.

Phots will stop with the curating, if your Mac is running on battery power. For a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air you can simply disconnect the power supply. The curating will resume, when you connect the device again to the power supply and restart Photos.

I had this issue as well, though my setup might be unique to others. I have about 16,000 items which are a mix of photos and videos I've accumulated over the years and my Photos Library is located on an external hard drive that was formatted to exFAT (so I could use it both on a Mac and PC). When I upgraded to Catalina, I ran into this issue where curation was stuck at about 30% and the photos app was very sluggish when I scrolled through pictures or tried to open a picture.

After trying a bunch of other fixes and looking through the Console to identifying errors related to photos, I ended up, backing up my Photos Library to another location, then reformatted my external hard drive from exFAT to APFS (Apples File System), then I copied my Photos Library back to the external hard drive (APFS formatted drive).

After I did that, the Photos app was running much faster than before and I noticed curation completed the next day.

I also noticed scanning for faces was working again as well

Note: In my experience I need to quit out of the Photos app for it to make progress in scanning faces.

Hope this helps!

This guide worked for me! I did every step except the disk repair one. Also moved my library from external HD to actual computer. I didn't do them in order, the last thing I did before it started working was repair photos library https://android-pc-ios-data-recovery.com/fix-photos-app-stuck-on-curating-catalina/