Photo's stuck on Catalina?

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 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 *****. 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.

UPDATE. I have spent 2 - 3 hours with an Apple help person. I have had three recordings of the computer/Photos activities and the Apple engineers are looking at it now. They are taking it quite seriously. I believe that, when they see what is causing the curation process to stop that there will be an update.

Painful for now, but at least they have listened and are actively sorting it out.

Stay tuned......

My question is should you keep Photos open or closed. I know you need to be plugged in for the process to work but not sure as to having Photos open or closed. I called Apple Support on this, and if I recall correctly, they said keep Photos closed, but either way I don't see that I am making any progress and it has been weeks. I have about 20,000 photos and 500 videos. Any thoughts?

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

Thanks for quick response. I'll try open and minimize for a while as I have been keeping it closed most of the time. Let's see if that makes any progress. And maybe that was what Apple support was referring to when he suggested keeping it closed - that is how it will work best for face scanning. It sure is a conundrum.

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.

I’ve eventually had my case referred to the development team, after having spent hours on the phone to the creative team and doing a 2nd library repair so let’s see what that produces. A lot of the staff I spoke to didn’t have a clue what the analysing of library was about and that it was something I’d asked it to do which is slightly worrying!

Signing out then back in is a nuclear option. I've done that 3x over the course of 6 going on now 7 weeks. That begins a new, lengthy process all over again.

For example: I deleted my old library, and decided to download a fresh one from iCloud. It went pretty fast except it was stuck on the last 5% of the library for 4 days. I tried logging out and back into icloud. So, now, the computer and iCloud are talking one another and the Mac is "uploading" all the downloaded pics already on the Mac to iCloud (which is where I got them). I'm 20% through this process in 8 days. 2.5% of the library a day, thus far.

Something is wrong here and it won't be remedied by steps like these. Where is the bottleneck? 900/750 Fios internet, 72GB of memory, 2019 3.6GHz 8 Core Intel i9. It's moving at a snail's pace. It's absolutely absurd. And, every remedy begins a new process that moves at a snail's pace, likely toward the same conclusion.

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...

yeah i hear you. would be nice for some feedback. i escalated my matter to engineering in the hopes my pain would help lead to a solution of some kind. unfortunately, my interactions with engineering are on hold until my sync is complete. but what if it doesn't complete? lol . i mean i hope it does by 2020.

Great info and I will go ahead and sign out and sign back in. Just one question, however. Not sure if this makes any difference and might be part of my problem. In Preferences under Photos I have the bottom two boxes checked - My Photo Stream and Shared Albums. But not the top one, iCloud Photos, as I don't really want to buy more space in the Cloud. I have about 20k pictures and 500 short videos (which I need to clean up, btw). Any thoughts on that?

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

In some of the conversations on this topic, I have seen some reference to identifying progress being made in the process. Other than the progress line being at about 80% for weeks, is there another way to decipher what progress is being made. I know something is going on as I keep getting those rotating notes - Analyzing...Gathering...Detecting...but wondering if there is some other way to detect progress.

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!