Photo's stuck on Catalina?

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.

That’s interesting that you say “Apple are aware of it” that’s certainly not the impression Ive had after the hours I’ve spent on the phone to them. Hopefully you get a resolution and I look forward to it being rolled out in an update.

They are. I have had several sessions. They have put photos through its paces and recorded both that and system activities. The engineers are working on it. They will get back to me some time.

i found that photos crashed several times today, especially when I rotated the image.

i will let them know that as well.

After updating to Catalina on my iMac and attempting to restore my Photos Library, my 95,000 photographs stopped uploading with around 3,200 pictures left. The answer for my problem was in an Apple Toolbox article which suggested I sign out of my iCloud account and then sign back in. This worked for me! The only caveat I have is that in order to sign back in to your iCloud account you will need your Apple ID and login password. This might be problematic as there are instances when folks entering their Apple password discover that it is not "recognized." I had to enter my password in three times before I was allowed back into my account. This has also happened to me in the past and eventually I had to resort to changing my password to gain access. You can read the Apple Toolbox article here: https://appletoolbox.com/how-to-sign-in-and-sign-out-of-icloud-on-macos-catalina/

I have a 2019 iMac, I have tried many of the suggestions here, but my iPhotos has been stuck in this process for 7 weeks!!

My MacBook Pro Retina worked within about 10 mins, frustrating. Why doesn't apple consider issuing fix files like FixIT surely it would be helpful!!

I'm going to dedicate another evening to it tonight, I'll report back any success.

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.

1)my computer has been 'curating' for 3 days now,

2) during this process, my storage on Macbook went from 90GB down to currently 69.7GB,

3) my 60% of my Photo ALBUMS have disappeared and the ones I see look like are from iPhoto 4 years ago

4) Apple has been randomly duplicating photos in my iPhoto/(now)Photo for several iOS's now....

5) I believe it's Duplicating the whole library since storage is decreasing before my eyes during Curating

6) Photos are being Duplicated and RENAMED with WRONG DATES and MOVED around in diff years!

Apple Support said that maybe my Albums will reappear after curating is done (but maybe not) !!! And Photos on Macbook hasn't imported Photo Albums from iPhone for YEARS either.... (but imports individual photos)... so now my problem with Photo Albums is tenfold, iPhoto library is GONE and not supported by Catalina, And I was never aware that I was supposed to Merge those libraries/Never prompted and now it doesn't even exist on Macbook any more. Now it's a whole different Photo Album list in my library-from like 5(?) years ago.

Even after reboot Apple Photos is stuck in an endless loop of "detecting duplicates", "gathering favourites", "curating best photos", "composing layout" and "analysing scenes". How is it possible that with all its resources Apple is not able to provide a stable solution for simple tasks like uploading photos? These kinds of situations never happen with other cloud providers like Google or Microsoft. Very disappointed.

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?

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!

Yep, so is mine. I wish I could get some kind of indication as to how far it’s come but progress line at the same place (about 80%) and still going. And I have the new Catalina update. Oh well, at least some of you are meeting with success so will just be patient.

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"!

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?

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!