Catalina Photos Problems

I would need an internal SSD of at least 2TB to keep all my originals on and internal drive and still have space to use the MacBook - it needs to run on an external drive and it needs to be faster and smoother - it was far better before I upgraded to Catalina.

I am replying from my MacBook and my local copy of Photos is on an external hard drive connected to my iMac. When I return to it I will test the right click/packages that you describe. My Photos is now generally doing what I would expect, except that the Photos Library on the external drive does not show any increase in size despite regular additions.

Totally unrelated, I have had problems with Hazel app since Catalina. It continues to work as expected, but when I try to edit an existing or create a new rule it hangs or responds very slowly. It always reacted immediately before I installed Catalina. Other apps have issues too, but you get the idea without me describing all of them.

I think Apple owes users some explanations and rapid corrective actions. I do not expect to pay a premium to use Macs and then spend hours (actually days) troubleshooting each time Apple "upgrades" the OS. This is simply not good enough.

I am at the same point as well, been trying to resolve for a few months. Photos file is on an external drive, correctly formatted. It won't let me make it the system photo file. All worked fine before catalina. What I have noticed if I upload new photos to the mac (after going through Photos wanting to reload my 80000+ photo file) the new photos do upload to iCloud and show on the phone, but noting from the phone is coming through to the mac and every time I relaunch it, we go back into the file updating routine. Thankful for 94mbs internet, only takes a day or two.

Hopefully someone at Apple pays attention to this and hits a tick box that people are annoyed.

What an incredibly bad experience Apple! Catalina has slowed access to my photos (on an external high speed hard drive) down to the point its unusable. And this is using a top of the line, highly upgraded MacBook Pro 15. This is ridiculous!! I have almost lost all faith in Apple to build and deliver a quality experience. For those of us that have had Macs and digital cameras for years, we have large photo libraries. You seem to be building apps for people who only have small photo libraries that fit on the solid state internal drives. Please fix this!!!!!!!

Which internal SSD did you buy and was it easy enough to transfer the pics from the external drive to the Internal SSD - if that’s what you did of course?

I’ve never used an internal SSD before and all my photos are stored on my external drive (connected via USB) - this is what I think is causing the problem with Photos - slow and clunky. It was ok using Mojave with my external drive but since updating the IOS to Catalina it is ridiculously slow.

I can't believe there are no concrete answers to this issue. Can this site be a little more useless?

I have been syncing my photos using Photos to an external drive for over decade. Now it is a problem. The worst part is that there seems to be no answers forthcoming nor acknowledgement by Apple.

Very disappointing!

Sorry not a fix for my 1.3Tb photo library. It has been done several times and takes days.

no better.

i have two macs and both have photo that crash regularly when editing albums. Taking an age to reload the library.

In my view neither. My 1.3Tb shows as 3.93Gb

i have loads of problems with Catalina - as well as photos size, slow, crashing, as well as the very inefficient sync if you have to remove you Apple ID to fix the problems with battery life on the Apple Watch and phone, then have to re upload your photo library to get it back in sync again. It is quicker to delete your library and re download which for me takes well over a week before the library starts to settle down again.

also my MacBook pro loses the keyboard and mouse when waking from sleep and takes an age to find them again. This has been a disastrous upgrade as far as I am concerned - I left Microsoft to get away from this sort of mess.

its time Apple responded with an acknowledgement of all these problems and issued a full list and fixed them all.

I have had the same issue above and thus read all posts ever since to find a solution. In my case, I found that the problem was not actually on the Catalina itself but with the new format APFS.

My IMAC is late 2015. It has a hard drive that is extremely slow for the processor installed. So, about a year ago, I installed a Samsung T5 external SSD to use as my main drive and it became a total different machine. Wonderful speed. I am using now the internal and original HD as storage only and all my photos were stored that. It worked perfectly till the update on Catalina. After that no way to import/read the destination photo archive. However I have a second hard drive (not a SSD) formatted for Mac OS Expanded Jornal.. and decided to move the original photo library to this external drive. That worked perfectly and I have no further problem neither reading my photos nor with processing speed. I hope this is help for some of you reading.

I think you will find everyone having problems are already using the correct formatting for their external drives. I have two macs both Mac OS extended journaled and both are dreadfully slow and crash a lot when I do major changes to the album structure. Or do multiple edits to many photos.

Try using an external SSD such as the Samsung T5. All your problems will be gone. Clone your original HD and use it as your main drive. About a year ago I was at the point of replacing my computer due to the issues you reported. Today I am pretty sure that my Imac will still stay with me for many mote years.

After months of ineffective troubleshooting with and without apple support, I ended up extracting all my originals from the iPhoto and Photos library, a process that took 1 month for my 1 tb photo collection. Starting from scratch on a new Photos library on a blank external drive formatted as Extended Journaled. First test imported 300 images and videos, 1Gb total. Pictures imported fine, videos were imported as if they were taken on the day of the import (original file was dated 2005). After 2hrs it was still working on analyzing the library. Cancelled the process in sheer frustration.

No solution but the best I have found is to kill the local library - start a fresh in new system library on an external drive and download full quality images from iCloud.

takes ages for 1.3Tb and still shows incorrect library size and still runs slow and crashes a lot. But it updates ok so I always have full images on my server.

apple need to fix photos but they don’t seem to accept it is a problem.

i look forward to a working photos system again someday.

It's not the drives that are crashing, but the application while running the library on those drives. It's more likely the libraries are damaged and causing the crashes rather than the drives themselves.

I have been on to Apple Support a few weeks ago who have repaired my library therefore I do not understand why the library would still be crashing & running so erratically if i t had been repaired - is Catalina damaging the library even when fixed?? At the end of the day, Catalina has caused these snags and here is hoping Apple sort it out - sooner rather than later.