Installed Catalina on a 2018 Macbook Pro. Ran photos and it has been sitting at :"gathering favorites, detecting duplicates, curating best photos, composing layout, etc." about 30% complete without progress bar moving for the last 30 mins. How long should it take to setup Photo's in 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 was chatting with some Apple support staff and they don’t know why Photos is not updating by WiFi. One of then requested to me to disconnect Photos iCloud an connect again, I had to leave MacBook all the night connected by cable to my home net and to the electricity to let it to update.
I rang Apple Support for an update. I'm told 10.15.3 has been released, to update to that, and see how it goes. Sooo ... about to do so. Fingers crossed.
My photos just finished updated after about 6 full day and nights. 280,000 photos and I am SO HAPPY!
It works much better than ever before. Drag and drop from SHARED folders, no lag, no issues. Snappy and quick!
A huge upgrade for all of us. Well done Apple!
Michael
I had done it previously but did it again...the result was an unfortunate "0". I just started a repair on the library that had the videos and screenshots deleted. If it still get stuck, then I plan on deleting media types until its only pictures.
Update...after hunting down tons of potentially broken files, it appears as if this is nothing more than a bug with Catalina. iOS 13.2 was just released, and wouldn't you know it, the curation on my iPhone XS and iPad Pro instantly finished after I updated to 13.2. My iPad mini, which was still on 13.1, was still chugging along, stuck at the same spot. After updating it to 13.2...BOOM. Curation complete.
for whatever reason i re-ran the repair option on the photo library and it seems to have thrown a few photographs away and 1 video but seems to have updated itself (from Icloud) ok ... the curation isnt running as such which is weird but tbh i would rather it didnt run anyway ..... im watching to see what happens but not convinced it is right yet nor what really happened to resolve it...
Yes, there IS light at the end of the tunnel! I hung in there thanks to the encouragement of everyone on this post/thread. After approximately 2 months, I saw those beautiful words "Curating Complete"! I thought I was seeing things at first, but it was real! This happened before my latest upgrade to 10.15.2. The last 2 weeks of the process, I decided not to keep my external drive and laptop plugged in when I was not home, so I shut down Photos to give everything a rest. Who knows, it may have finished faster had left everything running. My library has 55, 200 photos and 879 videos, and I did go through and clean out any videos that were not compatible. I believe I had only 5 videos that did not play and had blacked out thumbnails. Good luck to everyone out there!
I didn't do as much debugging as other people tried on this post. All I did was to click on "Videos", and as I scrolled down I noticed some thumbnails were black. When I clicked on them, they didn't play so I deleted those. I didn't delete any photo files. Good luck!
More progrèss, albeit a very slow boat to China. At time of typing, 4,098 photos. So that's 138 files curated over about 2 days.
To see number of items remaining, click on the Library named 'People', then scroll to the bottom, beneath the images of faces.
If a mobile device, ensure it's connected to power. Quit and launch Photos. If you go to the Photos album, click on the Days tab, then scroll to the bottom, you see that Photos is Curating, Composing, Gathering, Analysing, Detecting, etc .. and a progress bar saying "Leave device connected to power".
If you then go to the People album, scroll to bottom it should show you:
n Photos Scanned
n Photos Remaining
As I type this message, mine shows:
71,045 Photos Scanned
2,552 Photos Remaining
So a further 70 files have been scanned since my last post. Extremely slow progress, though without the Photos application providing more detail of progress, I'm unable to tell the reason. Still nit return call from Apple Support on the case I've raised. Then last call told me to update to 10.15.3 and that should resolve the problem. Nope.
Same situation as you. I tried all the solution posted in the forum. None was working. Then I have updated canon camera software, probably with new raw photo software. Then in less than one day the process was completed. Could be just a causality but this is what was working with me.
You've probably already tried this, but I'd be interested if it gave you any information: create a new Smart Album, then create this condition: Photo is unable to upload to iCloud Photos.
Same situation here. My Photos library is over 500GB with 25000 photos and is stored on an external drive. At times photos is almost unusably slow and I get keep get the beach ball of doom. It has been analyzing my library for over 24 hours and is hovering at about 85%. I've rebooted several times which did not resolve the behavior.
Disabling the auto-play video setting in Photos Preferences did help with some of the sluggishness when scrolling through my library.
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.
Photo's stuck on Catalina?
