Photo's stuck on Catalina?

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!

I have:

Photos: 11,209

Video: 234

Size 40.44 GB

This has been stuck at least 3 weeks. I have shut it down, rebooted, looked for bad videos as suggested. Still no joy.

I am willing to try anything at this point.

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.

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.

Stopping your iCloud upload halts the current progress but does not delete any progress already made. Once you then restart iCloud the upload progress continues from where it left off. It does not start over again because some of your photos have already uploaded to your computer. I had over 90K photos and over 100 videos when I initially started the process. My progress bar stopped uploading with 8K photos left to upload. It was at that point I turned off iCloud. When I restarted iCloud it started at the point it left off, with 8K photos left to upload.

I am not uploading tho. I am downloading a remaining 128 items.

so if I log out and in, the first thing that will happen is my computer will attempt to UPload 110k items that have already made it onto my computer from the cloud TO the cloud. The cloud will compare item by item, checking to see if each and every item from my computer is up there already. They are of course, but it will take a week minimum for that to finish checking. After those items are checked the cloud/computer will go back to trying to download remaining items from cloud to computer

After about a week of seemingly 0 progress, with the bar at about 10% , suddenly it finished and says "Your Photos, Curated" Wow, gee thanks apple. I love being kept in the dark like that. Ignorance is bliss after all :-\

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.

I’m still waiting on a response from Apple.

i don’t use iCloud and never have due to library size of 170k photos 2.5k Videos.

they’ve had me repair my library 4 times with no joy still gets stuck on approximately 90% and this has been doing this for months now since the original update was it September or October then the next update has made no difference:

I ended Catalina misery after downgrading to Mojave.

After upgrading to Catalina I spent days until Photos upgraded and curated.

But downgrade didn't resolve photos library as Mojave was unable to load it.

Got support from Apple to extract pictures from the library and recreate a new one at the cost of loss of albums.

Catalina issues not limited to photos.

It started to freeze and crash very frequently and memory got saturated.

At last I'm able to use my McBook Pro as usual.

"It started to freeze and crash very frequently and memory got saturated."

You're telling me!!!

I can't go back without a lot of hassle either, but my iMac is now constantly crashing, beachballing, VERY slow - and it wasn't before Catalina.

But will Apple do anything about it, will they heck!!!

With all the posts above - and many other Catalina performance issues posts elsewhere - isn't about time Apple stepped up to the plate and do what they pride themselves on ie high quality product and customer service?

Hi there.

I can confirm that I had this problem too and I tried searching for old unsupported AVI files (i.e. the thumbnail didn't work or the video didn't play, but I didn't have any videos that fell into this category).

I then searched for AVI files in general (just search .avi in the photos search box) and this identified 6 files all of which play perfectly fine in photos or in QuickTime player.

I exported these 6 files onto my desktop and then deleted them from the photos library and the curation then worked within about 5 minutes.

As such, even if you have AVI files that are working, it might be worth backing these up and then deleting them from the library to see if that works.

Hope this helps others!

Exactly the same story going here too!, so it's happening to many of us. My mbPro is 70% stuck, doing it's thing, yet on my iMac, it was completed very fast. On my dear little MacBook Air, it's so old (2013), I still have the old Photo's Program layout. So 'pleased' he's too old for this Catalina, I was quite happy with the old version! Anyway, stuck it is.

And those photo's of the years?, it uses the first photo you took 'that' year. Extremely annoying and how can I put a photo of my wedding as 2018? instead of a grey raining back yard. Must be a button to press?, so, I'm stuck, I don't like the Year icons at all and it's all getting far too virtual for my liking. Such is the modern world hey!, another new program layout to sort. Editing tools aren't that impressive either!...... I think Mac will update Photos again very soon, loads of complaints. :-) Mark, Amsterdam.

Hi.

Curation Complete !!

The problem, as earlier suggested, were corrupted photos in the library that the curation process could not read.

As above written, I have search for Photos that hat no ISO or Camera Model Info in the Metadata. I have found a few, but the ``Analysing... ``was still going. My Library has around 82.000 Photos and Videos.

Adding the Permissions to ``Administrators`` and ``Apply to enclosed items...`` + a restart, did not do anything. ``Analysing,..``was still going.

Today I have decided to take one by one the Photos in the Library (All Photos - view) and to my surprise I have still found a few. All of them were taken in 2014-2015. Back then I had my old iPhone 5s. After deleting these, the Curation was in a few minutes complete.

Needless to say that my iMac, late 2013, was always on since mid of November..., hoping that it would finish by itself... no it doesn't.

For those that have tried everything and the process is still not finished, my suggestion is that you should search manually for the corrupted Photos.

Thanks to everyone that wrote here trying to help us!

I had lots of trouble.

I had 170,000 pics, due to restoring pics from a hard drive crash and the programme found ANY type of image file (I had 30,000) genuine ones before that.

I found it loaded all the files well, but.......

I had used Spotlight to search for file types (JPEG) and put the results into a folder, THEN I got Photos to load them in. That seems to work well. It was the curation process that was a pain.

I would make a new folder, do the Spotlight search and put them all into the new folder and start with a new Photos library.

I also have ALL my documents on an 8TB external drive, with Time Machine using a second 8TB drive.

I used an older 3TB drive for the search results to go to first, then Photos library was on my 8TB docs drive.

I never keep docs on my computer, and save all important docs to iCloud AND Dropbox!! (Not my photos as there are too many for that).