iMac keeps crashing after Catalina upgrade

I'm a pro. photographer, so have all images on external drives.

When you wrote, "Delete your photos file is all you need to do." Did you mean to delete the Photos program as well as removing Photos Library? TIA, KL

To be clear, Photos and the background processes when syncing with iCloud was the source of my crashing. I make sure Photos has no place to create local copies of images. Whatever your process and and images locations are, protect them. I am not a professional photographer, software engineer.

I believe there is a corn job which is the source of some of the randomness. It’s connected with iCloud so I kept my primary Mac from synching photos using Photos app.

apologies for not being more clear....

Just let me know if you notice any differences or fewer crashes. I need more proof for Apple support. I’ve seen issues since last June and I’m so done. It’s stable now so I’m just praying it stays this way.

Catalina has me wanting to go back to a PC and every week I price build or buy, especially with Ubuntu now built into Windows.

I am having same issue, my macBook Pro 15" 2018 i7 32 GB is connected to Dell monitor, after keeping idle for a while, every 2-3 days its' freezing up and doesn't recover on its own after waiting for 5 - 10 min, need to force restart by holding power button. Hope apple fixes it soon.

Apple just deleted my prior comment because it was "off topic." This shows they do monitor their forums are aware of the issue but failing to either acknowledge the problem and/or are unable to resolve the kernel panics surrounding Catalina.

APPLE BEINGS HOW YOU ARE MONITORING THIS 88 PAGE THREAD HOW ABOUT A LITTLE CONSTRUCTIVE HELP??

That’s a bummer I was hoping for some sort of solution as I have literally tried everything short of dropping my Mac off a cliff. Was going to sell it and upgrade but now I feel that it’s about worthless as I cannot sell it in good conscious knowing it’s unstable.

Guess I’ll just keep sending in the kernel panic logs and hope they are looking at them.

I even reached out to OSX daily on Twitter to see if they were aware of a solution. They just said it was a known issue and were unaware of any work around at this time. They did say if they found a solution they would post it but that was months ago.

I bought a iMac Pro with Xeon and ECC memory, and migrated everything from my MacBook Pro that crashed all the time. No crashes after 2 months. I don't use my MacBook Pro anymore. Obviously this isn't a solution, but I just want to add to the conversation for what it's worth.

i have a macbook 12 2015 with m core. after update to catalina it keeps crashing. i can have 5 hard restart in a day until i give up. Sometimes question mark appeared during the start up. "yes i know you will say board fault" but why only after update, and it boot fine later.

finaly, yesterday i erase the mac disk (action of frustration) and install a fresh catalina. you know what, during the install, it keeps crashing when said "estimating time.....bla bla", over and over (just search the internet "catalina crash time estimating", you will know). after 3rd time it suddenly works and.... its been 1 day, no crash.

so i guess one option is fresh copy.. but it will be painful process too..

just make sure you erase all hdd rather than data partition, catalina partition a bit different.

cheers

This happened to me too. Exactly the same problem started when I first upgraded to 10.15.5 - and then I was able to fix it by using the 'Combo' update.

So, this time, I started with the 'Combo' update, hoping to avoid the problem.

It was less than 24 hours before the first crash of 10.15.6 - with the same 'watchdog timer' problem as before.

In troubleshooting the previous crashes, I'd already removed any old applications, particularly .kext files, that might have been troublesome.

Actually! I think there can be a very simple solution if we use a wire keyboard, instead has to do everything wirelessly. I am just guessing, I am to said, I have not holding any relation University education on that. I am just base on logic that this is a sleep related problems.

I’ve submitted crash reports for this issue a dozen times or more. It happens several times per week, not when actively using the iMac, but when waking it from sleep. I have attempted a fresh re-install previously without improvement.

This is not the Apple experience I’m used to. Sort of a bummer.

Here’s my system info:

Os 10.15.6

iMac Retina 4K, 2019

3.2 GHz i7

32 GB DDR4

Pro Vega 20 4GB

No external displays attached.

I have the same thing on a new iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, 2019) Catalina 10.15.6, it has happened almost every day since I purchased it 2 weeks ago, if I'm using it at the time the curser freezes and then it restarts, otherwise I come back to a computer that has restarted... somewhat disappointing on a new computer!

I've reported about this problem on my iMac on this thread a while ago and then stopped tracking it as nothing was really helping. But I may have some clues. My crashes were happening intermittently, sometimes going for days without crashing, and then suddenly the crashes start again in earnest and pretty much happens whenever I step away from the computer for an extended period. Sometimes the Mac wouldn't go to sleep on its own. I think it has to do with photolibraryd running. I've noticed that when the crashes are happening, my external hard drives are spinning, and when I check Activity Monitor, sure enough the top CPU loaded process is photolibraryd. I'll reiterate that my Mac is connected to 2 external monitors (one via USB-C and one via HDMI) and an external drive bay (via Thunderbolt). My Photos library is stored on one of my external drives. When I disconnect one of my external monitors (the one via HDMI), the crashes generally stop (I say generally because there were a couple times when it crashed anyway). But I wonder if these crashes have to do with photolibraryd running in the background (I assume it's syncing with iCloud when it runs) and when the Photos Library is not on the internal drive but on an external one.

2019 iMac 27-inch Retina 5K

3.6 Ghz 8-Core Intel Core i9

64GB 2667 Mhz DDR4 RAM

1 TB internal SSD drive

Catalina 10.15.6

¿Its clear that this is not app specific but completely OS bug .... Any solution yet ?

Unfortunately no is the answer .

Every OS update I keep thinking maybe this time ...

Have been able to go a day or even a week end after adding a OWC dock to my desktop setup ..

Using the MacBook alone crashing multiple times daily .. Walk away from MacBook 50/50 chance its crashed .

I don't understand how a completely OS bug goes unaddressed by apple & unreported` by any of the Mac Mediasphere for a year .

Model Name: MacBook Pro15"

Model Identifier: MacBookPro14,3

Processor Name: Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 4

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 6 MB

Memory: 16 GB

Boot ROM Version: 428.0.0.0.0

SMC Version (system): 2.45f4

Hardware UUID: 7CB8E735-28DB-520E-9579-0F5D5DE9D3E2

Free: 418.25 GB (418,246,864,896 bytes)

Capacity: 1 TB (1,000,240,963,584 bytes)

My new iMac had this problem from the start so I exchanged it for another identical one after a couple of weeks (at first I put it down to automatic software updates but it just kept happening several times every day) - so far I haven't had the same issue except for one random shut down overnight, I can't explain why as in theory there shouldn't be any difference between two identical iMacs running exactly the same OS.