Photo's stuck on Catalina?

I found out 3 days into restoring a clean library that I was yet again going nowhere: the "gathering favorites, detecting duplicates, curating best photos, composing layout" process got stuck after one day with no visible progress in sight. So I chose a more radical approach. I signed out of iCloud and then signed back in again. Deleted the library and recreated a new one which I promoted to system library. The full restore and "gathering ..." process was completed in one week. The progress bar was not linear but at least it was visibly moving with progression shown every day.

Seems that the people face screening process (which is yet another process) also almost completed. At least it has run out of pictures to still analyze but it still saying that it will fully complete when in the "background". Whatever that means.

I am cautious because I had reached this same stage before and that is when the library crashed and started to restore itself from scratch so I had to start all over again.

The whole thing is cryptic, unreliable, unstable and apparently poorly architected. The same processes run on ALL the Apple devices with the same iCloud library at the back end! Every time a new device is installed the ordeal starts all over again. The UX just sucks. The environmental footprint of all this data traveling and processing at multiple levels must be mind boggling. Maybe time for Apple to outsource the Photos app because the trillion dollar company has clearly reached its limits.

I found that, for me, what solved the issue of Photos being "stuck" and not uploading from iCloud was turning off my iCloud account and then turning it back on. Basically this resets the iCloud account and allows it to continue the downloading process. You must know your Apple ID to turn your account back on. I have listed directions in an earlier post.

Hi.

I remember the exclamation Mark.

I had to find a fast method to search through the 82.000 Photos.

My solution was:

In the Photos app, corner left up, click on the ''Photos'' category.

Middle up, click on the ''All Photos''.

You will see some of your photos in a Thumbnail view.

Scroll up to your FIRST photo in the library.

Double click on the first photo in the library so that it opens wide.

Under this photo, you will see a row of thumbnails of the next photos.

Here you can scroll to the right with the keyboard arrow.

In this row is where you will see the corrupted photos differently than the normal ones, because they will always be the colour GREY (at least for me they were).

If you have good eyes, you can keep the right arrow pressed, and just follow the flow of thumbnails in the bottom row.

This is how i have found all my corrupted photos. They were easy to recognise..., they were all grey.

After I have passed the years 2014-2015 I have checked the ''Curation'' status, and it was complete.

Best of luck !!

Hi.

did you also searched for missing Metadata like „ISO“ and „Camera model“?

My first search was for these 2 missing infos from the Photos. After deleting the corrupted Photos, the Curation was still going.

Then I started to search manually for them, and I have found a few that were taken withe an old iPhone. After deletion, the Curation was complete.

If you say that you have checked all your photos and still nothing.., I don‘t know ehat solution could that be.

There was a working solution in an other thread, that said one should add permissions to the external drive where the Library is saved, for „Administrators“, apply that first to all the contents of the drive, than do a restart.

I will post a link to that thread later.

Let it run. Expected behavior.

I have 14,000 photos and mine took a full two days to complete.

You fixed it. Thank you. Quit Photo's, quit everything else & restart your Mac.

Open photo's, mine sorted itself out in 15 minutes. Stuck is Unstuck!.

This worked for me https://android-pc-ios-data-recovery.com/fix-photos-app-stuck-on-curating-catalina/

Contrary to my previous post, I hadn't tried one thing ie delete non functioning videos ...

I found 3 that had no content and I have no idea where they came from - deleted them and the process completed within a. minute ...

As per another post, surely if this is a problem Apple could have coded in an error message?!!!

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.

What I did was to select the Media type -> Videos under Albums in the left menu 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.

i had a go at repairiing mine more or less as described above.

Restarted Photos and it started putting some pictures into an Unable to Upload Folder..

After a bunch had gone in I exported all of them (JPEG) format to a folder on my desktop and then deleted them from Photos ...

As I speak it appears to updating normally now.... fingers crossed. Once its done I will Import what I exported. BTW ALL the ones i have had to move so far have either been RAW or TIFF only..

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).

Have you double checked that "put hard disks to sleep when possible" is unchecked in Energy Saver in System Preferences? Also, I found that photoanalysisd would usually kick in when Photos was off screen and not being used or after I chose "confirm additional pictures" for one of the people in the People album.

OK world....very frustrating all this waiting around for apple photo to sort its self out, I will share one tip tho, I have been using a MacBook for years and keep all me data and photos on the external drive which goes between work and home.

Curation was very slow so was booting up the photo app.....so i invested in a 2 tb SSD external drive, now photos loads really fast, curation has finished, faces still to finalise however 40,000 photos and 8,000 vid clips.

Also photos app can be closed completely for the photanalized to work in the background.

Hang in there! The "progress" line was part of the frustration for me, too. It never inched along showing true "progress", so it would appear to be stuck. It would make jumps in progress. Mine was also at 80% or so for the last week or so before it made the jump to those beautiful words "Curation Complete"!