Photo's stuck on Catalina?

mines been doing it for about 5 days ; at the start of that 5 days I did the "rebuild photo library" which was probably a mistake. since then it has worked through 30000 items but is stuck on 3481 remaining..... and even after the latest Catalina update it is still refusing to budge. Having read the above will go looking for any old .AVI files.....

I have only about 1100 videos, so I guess my solution might be somewhat cumbersome if you have several thousand videos.

What I did was to select the Media type -> Videos under Albums and then scroll through all the thumbnails. Three of my videos did not have a thumbnail and when I tried to play them I got an error message (not supported or similar). Hope this helps.

Just an idea: maybe it runs for longer time for the people who have the photo library bound to iCloud, with storage optimizing turned on, like me, while for those who have it fully downloaded on their local computer, it works faster. (Although IMO for those who have the photos online the scripts to find duplicates and so on could/should be run on the server; not sure if Apple does so...) Mine didn't finish, but I don't let the computer on power overnight anymore. Will be interesting to see if the photo library gets curated before macOS 10.16. :)

I have all my photos on my iMac local storage and it’s still stuck... whereas on my MacBook the process completed very quickly in an hour or so, where I have optimised storage with the same set of photos/video...

so it’s pretty random I would say

apple has really messed up this years updates across the board... there are so many bugs everywhere

can’t get sidecar to work with a cable for instance... my music app won’t add music played on my Mac to recently played in the for you tab...

Can’t agree more. Having wasted / waited days for this to fix , to find it stuck or crashed, giving different totals to my other Apple device I’ve spent thousands on.... still not working.

Apple expects premium prices and loyalty for a quality product and it seems to be in decline these days. Too many basic defects. Sort your stuff out Apple.... you can only take the high ground when you have it .... and you’re slowly slipping down it IMHO. Sorry but just fed up with this kind of hassle.

After the comment from MutangtSquid, I ran through all pictures in "AllPhotos" mode, and sat view to thumbnail, whereby I saw, that I had some 30 pictures, that couldn't be shown. Appeared as white blocks.

I have removed these pictures snd restarted the program several times, and letting It run in the background for 3 hours now.

Would just write, that this didn't have any influence - and checked it once again, and now it went through.

So - to conclude:

Removing the "blanks" did it for me.

It though took some time to find all "blanks".

Had to go through the list a couple of times, to find them all. You are stirring yourselves a bit blind in all those thumbnails.

Tanks for the tip MutantSquid.

/jesper

If your progress bar is not moving when "uploading" your photos from iCloud, then I suggest reading the following TWO articles from Apple ToolBox. The first article talks about issues with iCloud and Photos, and ways to fix them on an iPhone. (although it outlines the steps for an iPhone, you can take similar steps on an iMac - just google the steps for an iMac). The second article is the steps I used to solve the stuck progress bar (it was stuck on 95% complete and 3,200 photos left to upload on my iMac). Briefly, the procedure was to quit Photos, sign out of iCloud, sign back in to iCloud and then restart Photos. This process gives you a "thorough reboot" of the iCloud software. NOTE: If you quit iCloud and restart it, you will be asked for your Apple login ID and password. Some folks have had problems logging back in to iCloud (password not recognized error). I had to log in 3 times before I was "recognized." Once I reopened Photos my photographs finished uploading to my iMac.

Article 1 (iCloud Backup Won’t Complete and other Backup Related Issues, Troubleshooting Guide) - https://appletoolbox.com/troubleshooting-guide-if-icloud-backup-wont-complete/

Article 2 (How to sign in and sign out of iCloud on macOS Catalina) - https://appletoolbox.com/how-to-sign-in-and-sign-out-of-icloud-on-macos-catalina/

I hope this helps.

You need to keep Photos open while it is downloading pictures from iCloud. Once that ha finished you need to shut down Photos but keep your iMac running for the software to sync faces. Both of these processes take time. I had 90,000 photos and it took around 3 days to download all the photos. It's been over 5 days now and I still have 5,000 photos to go for the facial sync.

You should be able to see progress being made from the counters for both processes. My iCloud stopped uploading at around 3,200 photos to go. If your progress bar is not moving when "uploading" your photos from iCloud, then I suggest reading the following TWO articles from Apple ToolBox. The first article talks about issues with iCloud and Photos, and ways to fix them on an iPhone. (Although it outlines the steps for an iPhone, you can take similar steps on an iMac - just google the steps for an iMac). The second article is the steps I used to solve the stuck progress bar (it was stuck on 95% complete and 3,200 photos left to upload on my iMac). Briefly, the procedure was to quit Photos, sign out of iCloud, sign back in to iCloud and then restart Photos. This process gives you a "thorough reboot" of the iCloud software. NOTE: If you quit iCloud and restart it, you will be asked for your Apple login ID and password. Some folks have had problems logging back in to iCloud (password not recognized error). I had to log in 3 times before I was "recognized." Once I reopened Photos my photographs finished uploading to my iMac.

Article 1 (iCloud Backup Won’t Complete and other Backup Related Issues, Troubleshooting Guide) - https://appletoolbox.com/troubleshooting-guide-if-icloud-backup-wont-complete/

Article 2 (How to sign in and sign out of iCloud on macOS Catalina) - https://appletoolbox.com/how-to-sign-in-and-sign-out-of-icloud-on-macos-catalina/

I hope this helps.

Agree with E Lop and this seems to ONLY be a Catalina issue from what I can see.

I think signing out and back in to Icloud does help though - Mine would not download everything from Icloud until I had signed out of Icloud on EVERY device - that included Ipad / Apple TV (x 2) / Imac (running Sierra) and my new Macbook pro . Once I did that every photo/video downloaded on my MBPro with Ctalina - although for my Ipad and my old Imac they already had all the media downloaded but I checked all files and the counts were the same - before this the Mbpro had a different count I am sure.

So now that it downloaded on the MBPro (my library is about 37Gb and 15k of files) it started the curation process .... The only place I can see it still doing something is in 'Faces' and it tells me it will continue reviewing my files when i stop using Photos. I think it is still working (3 weeks in btw) since I have seen a new 'memory' every few days - would be nice to see what its actually processing (Debug mode please Apple) to see it is moving .. Im now of the opinion its just incredibly slow ..glacial even....

formal Apple response ot this issue would be nice... love the way they never get involved in these boards...

Greetings skiblues.

I am guessing you are writing about the uploading of all your individual photos and videos from iCloud to Photos, and that you are looking at the progress bar in the PHOTOS section. My problem here started when the progress bar stopped making any progress, the percentage loaded stayed the same and the number of photos to upload stayed the same. If you are not making any progress with the percentage uploaded I believe that the iCloud uploading has gotten stuck in some type of loop. If Photos is working properly you should see slow but steady progress in the percentage to upload, the progress bar and the number of photos left to upload.

The following was what I did to get iCloud to continue uploading my photos. Briefly, the procedure was to quit Photos, sign out of iCloud, sign back in to iCloud and then restart Photos. This process gives you a "thorough reboot" of the iCloud software. NOTE: If you quit iCloud and restart it, you will be asked for your Apple login ID and password. Some folks have had problems logging back in to iCloud ("password not recognized" error). I had to log in 3 times before I was "recognized." Once I reopened Photos my photographs finished uploading to my iMac.

Here's the articles that helped me figure out the problem and step by step on how to turn off/on iCloud:

Article 1 (iCloud Backup Won’t Complete and other Backup Related Issues, Troubleshooting Guide) - NOTE: article talks about an iPhone, but the problem / solution is the same. https://appletoolbox.com/troubleshooting-guide-if-icloud-backup-wont-complete/

Article 2 (How to sign in and sign out of iCloud on macOS Catalina) - https://appletoolbox.com/how-to-sign-in-and-sign-out-of-icloud-on-macos-catalina/

I hope this helps.

Greetings. I have successfully used the iCloud sign out / sign in to fix the photos not uploading. To your question -- in Photo Preferences > iCloud -- I only have the last box checked (Shared Albums). I do not have the following boxes checked: iCloud Photos and My Photo Stream.

I have 90,000 photos and over 100 videos which together takes up about 1TB of space. I just upgraded my iMac to a 4TB Solid State Drive so I would have enough room for my photos, software, documents and "room to grow." I load all my photos from the camera to my iMac. They are stored on the iMac, in the cloud and on an external Time Machine. I have NO photos moved from the cloud to my Mac laptop because the drive is to small. I have all the photos moved from the cloud to my iPhone, but only the thumbnails, so they take up less room. Pictures I take with my iPhone are uploaded to the cloud and then too my iMac.

Bottom line, I don't think it matters what you have checked in Photos Preferences.

I think one of the issues with the slowness of the process is if folks have more than one Mac computer. Uploading photos from the cloud to both an iMac and a Mac laptop would require a bunch of time, depending on the number of photos and videos, their resolution, the length of videos, your internet speed, etc.

A hint at what you might face next, AFTER you have uploaded all of your photos. The next thing my computer did was to scan the faces in PEOPLE. You can watch it happen by opening Photos and then clicking on People. Scroll to the bottom of that page and it will give you an update. It took over a week for my computer to scan through all 90K photos. HINT: In order for this to work you have to leave the Photos software turned OFF but your computer turned ON. Let your computer run 24/7 if possible and didn't let the computer go to sleep automatically.

Lastly, the issue now is that all the edits I made on individual photos since before I installed Catalina are "gone." The edited thumbnail photos still show the edited symbol (three horizontal sliders) and they look like the edited version. However, if you click on the thumbnail, then click on EDIT, what you see (if your Mac is like my Mac) is the unedited, un-cropped original photo as it came out of the camera. If you export that photo you get the unedited version. If you don't edit that photo and just click Done, the resulting photo, and the thumbnail, show the edited photo. Weird, I know. I'm hoping that the software revision that's coming will download the editing commands from the Cloud back to the computer.

Hi guys. The People tab in my library is normal (it's finished analyzing the library for faces). I'm not seeing any of those status bar messages you guys have mentioned. "detecting duplicates", "gathering favourites", "curating best photos", "composing layout" and "analysing scenes" etc.

I'm stuck on downloading 115 originals and have been for a week. My library is big. 1.6TB, 98k photos, 11k videos.

Is there hope?

I’m still waiting on a response from Apple.

i don’t use iCloud and never have due to library size of 170k photos 2.5k Videos.

they’ve had me repair my library 4 times with no joy still gets stuck on approximately 90% and this has been doing this for months now since the original update was it September or October then the next update has made no difference:

I had lots of trouble.

I had 170,000 pics, due to restoring pics from a hard drive crash and the programme found ANY type of image file (I had 30,000) genuine ones before that.

I found it loaded all the files well, but.......

I had used Spotlight to search for file types (JPEG) and put the results into a folder, THEN I got Photos to load them in. That seems to work well. It was the curation process that was a pain.

I would make a new folder, do the Spotlight search and put them all into the new folder and start with a new Photos library.

I also have ALL my documents on an 8TB external drive, with Time Machine using a second 8TB drive.

I used an older 3TB drive for the search results to go to first, then Photos library was on my 8TB docs drive.

I never keep docs on my computer, and save all important docs to iCloud AND Dropbox!! (Not my photos as there are too many for that).

The solution for originals in the cloud being stuck downloading in original format to a Mac from the cloud is not in this thread. Smug DRPV thinks otherwise. Perhaps it's written in an invisible UV font that only he sees when he shines a blacklight on it.

Facts: There is acknowledgement from Apple engineers (whom I have an open case with) that this is a problem with no known solution.

Facts: I've worked on this problem with them for 3 months

Facts: Creating a new library, logging in/out of icloud on devices, removing AVI/DNG files, turning computer off/on (laziest advice ever), rebuilding libraries, etc are not current solutions.

For anyone jumping in on the tail end of this chain, if you are wondering if your problem is the problem being described in this thread, here is a rough outline of the discussion when you enter hoping that our problem with Photos being "Stuck" is the same as your problem being "Stuck"

85% of posts are related to a lengthy curation process.

10% of posts are related to a lengthy upload process

4% misc

1% related to "Downloading Originals" to your Mac progress bar being stuck

The 1% is described below:

1) Everything goes up to cloud ok from ios devices.

2) Originals are stuck downloading to your mac from cloud