Photo's stuck on Catalina?

"SAhortly after it finished curating my 50000 photos, it started over, when I imported new photos."

What, a complete re-run ie many, many hours? - that simply can't be right ...

And I agree with another post, Photos is unusably slow at times (plus beach balling) - me thinks a re-think is needed by someone ...

Well, this is just weird.

On my duplicated library, I let it run all night, and it got stuck at the exact same spot as before. Since this is a duplicated library, I've decided to try and eliminate file types from the equation. I deleted all my videos. Still stuck. Now I'm on to screenshots...

actually on my macbook air mid2013, library of 11000photos and perhaps 200 videos.

175go, raws (NEF) are heavy ...

I see the "photoanalysisd" is always at 0%. don't know the reason why ... any idea ? I guess the problem is probably here.

my library is on an external device (HDD USB3).

I have this problem since Catalina was installed. I have 164106 pictures and 1463 videos. Upon install, the "gathering favorites, detecting duplicates, curating best photos, composing layout" process got stuck after one day or so. I let it run for one week, days and nights, without the progress bar showing any progress. I then killed the entire library and restored it fully from iCloud. The "gathering favorites, ..." almost went to the end and then Photos crashed and started to restore from scratch again. 3rd attempt from yet again a clean restore is stuck at about 15% of "gathering favorites, ..." (see screenshot below). The progress bar has not moved in almost 2 weeks. The people face process goes all the way in about a week. I saw that some of the users recommended to watch for videos, so I deleted all the video files > 2 minutes, then rebooted: the progress bar is still not moving. The migration to Catalina is a nightmare, at least for Photos. I have a powerful MacBook Pro, lots of RAM and as fast an Internet access as you can find in the US. Seriously, Apple? Interestingly enough, the iPhone does not seem to mind and completed the whole process in a few days.

Good day.... well Apple does not make it clear ... but I to have left it ope, minimised, and closed completely , what I did do was open photos then activity monitor, search photo then you can see the prossessers working.... when you then close photo you can clearly see the photoanalizer keeps working... just to let you know after weeks it’s still trying to update faces but it is getting there... as others say when fully finished and working it should be a bloody good app... good luck

This helped a lot. I realised there were some several videos which were long and had blank thumbnails. Some were movies I imported to my old ipad and synced. Just removed them. Hope it speeds up the process.

I have 50,000 pics on an external drive. It's been 'curating' them for over a week now with no progress. I spoke to Apple and they recorded the system activity for an hour. No reply as yet. I have re-started, flashed the PRAM, started in 'safe mode' etc. It is very poor.

i think face scanning only happens when closed, but that other facets of icloud sync occur whether open or closed.. honestly have no idea, not clear to me, either.

i keep it open and minimized. would rather sync first and circle back to get the face scanning done later and syncing seems occur for me when the app is open not closed

TBH I personally dont think that it's Icloud thats the issue - everything seems to get stored up there ok and downloads ok (eventually once you sign out and in to Icloud - but I know others may not agree with this its simply my experience of what I found had to happen before they all came down). But as you are working locally the issue is Photos itself in its curation process and the lack of visibility into that process

Hey everyone - just in case you haven’t read the update. Apple have recorded both system and Photos activity over a period of time. They are aware of the issue and the Engineers are working on a fix. I believe it will come out in an update.

I have not been using iCloud for the pics, so that is not the issue as far as I am aware.

Apple are in contact with me as they need additional info, and are using my situation as a test case.

I will let you know when I get further info - or we will all get an update - hopefully soon!

I have been working with the Apple engineers, they took recordings of Photos activity and system activity.

They have the info, they know there’s a real problem. They said they will issue a fix, once they sort out what the issue is, as many don’t have the same issue!

So, nothing ,ore to do than to wait - sadly.

They have worked with me for some time, gathering data from my computer on what it was doing, and what the issue is.

I just checked photos today, after a week of being idle, and it is FINISHED!!!!

I have just updated the system as well, I think they may have implemented a solution?

WOW! That's not a big library, that's a HUGE library! :) With such a huge portion being videos, I would guess that it may take a while.

The status bar messages ("detecting duplicates", "gathering favourites", "curating best photos", "composing layout" and "analysing scenes" etc.) were at the bottom of the screen in the Photos section in the "Days" tab, but not when looking at "All Photos".

I hop this gives you a little bit of hope!

I updated to macOS 10.15.1 on 2019-11-28. Finally on 2019-12-26 (4 weeks later) it finished curating photos. I talked with several Apple advisors, senior supervisors, and photos experts. Not a single one of them gave any useful information regarding this problem. Apple should advise users about issues like this. Also I find curating of photos of no use to me and I dislike the results. It should be an option instead of standard. Also should give better indication of progress during curating.

Sorry, I misread your original post. I turned OFF iCloud when it apparently got stuck uploading my photos to my iMac after the installation of Catalina (the issue that most folks here are discussing). When I turned iCloud back ON, it continued the upload from the spot where it "got stuck" -- at 8K photos left to upload. iCloud did not take any time to check my previously uploaded 82K photos to see where it left off or to see if there were any deletions, etc.

Based on that experience, I'm GUESSING that if you turned OFF iCloud during a download of photos, and then turned iCloud back on, that the download process would continue from where it left off when you turned iCloud off. That is only a GUESS on my part, however.