Catalina Photos Problems

There could be a damaged/corrupted photo in the library that's causing the problem. A repair might fix the library temporarily but when the photo is accessed again it crashes. Just a theory but happens.

No it happens with any number of photos and I have tested everyone in a small library - the photos are ok the new photo app and Catalina are to blain - Apple fix it. I have been to highest level of support and they can’t give me a fix.

Thank you Old Toad for suggested ways. Will try it especially considering that my situation is almost exactly same as yours (mid-2015 iMac with system on external SSD and photos lib on internal HDD - which is currently on APFS). I intend to re-init it as Journaled ext and will report if that improves the situation.

P.S. It starts to smell flames here ... some ppl are not really looking for a solution but just for a subject to blame and demand a fix.

I think everyone is looking for new ideas - I for one have been to the highest level in Apple photos support. They have had access to my machines and can’t find a solution - they have even accepted that there are deficiencies in the way photos syncs with iCloud. Particularly with large libraries greater than 1Tb. We have tried rebuilding library, repairing and everything else suggested here. I am hopefully that someone will come up with a new idea that might work. The best solution I have been offered by Apple support is - reformat system hard drive as APFS and reinstall Catalina. Then format external drive as MacOS extended journaled (essential for photos) create new system library on external hard drive - then download full quality images from iCloud. See if it works Then reinstall all other essential apps and see if it still works.

this takes a long time even on my fastest MacBook Pro 2018 model with 32gb ram and fast fibre internet connection.

it still crashes after extended period of use and is still very slow to load the library.

if anyone has really found a solution that works I would love to hear it, but please don’t offer past suggestions because they have all been tried.

i am still working with Apple support but we are not getting anywhere and they are not connected to development who need to accept there are real problems effecting the way photos works on Catalina.

I may have found a solution.

I had an older mac running mojave and had no problems with my photos or icloud syncing across devices.

Then i upgraded to a new macbook pro running Catalina. Once i migrated everything to the new machine, only half of my library would show up on my mac and would not show the latest photos (or the oldest photos) taken on my phone or which show up on iphone 8, ipad pro etc.

I tried (and failed) a couple of attempts to fix the library. But one step was to select the "use as system library" under Photos > Preferences option, which converted my library to an icloud accout. (which i am not sure why it wasn't in the first place, since my libary has always been icloud.) I didn't see all of my photos - my (Catalina) library showed that it was only 53Gb but my original library was 150Gb (under User > Pictures > Photos Library) Since I didn't see all of my photos i went back to my old mac and copied my larger library to an external flash drive. then copied to my new computer and replaced the broken library with my older library (even though it was a few weeks old by then and many new photos on my camera roll hadn't sync'd to my computer). And - in conjuction with an older google search - i opted to quit the photos app. then hold down the option key while you re-open the photos app. a dialog will come up to select a library or create a new one. instead of clicking what came up in the list (or in my case it was blank) I selected the button on the bottom saying select "other library" and browsed to my newly replaced (old) library (i would assume that you could also use time machine to pull your libary from before you had upgraded to catalina and restore it to your computer to replace the catalina version). once i selected the 150gb version library, i went to icloud in system preferences and selected the check mark next to Photos. and i made sure under photos preferences that it showed "icloud" preferences instead of the "system library" message. It started "uploading" around 8,000 photos that were missing from the library. it took nearly all day to go through this "uploading" phase. but once it finished, it synced my newest photos and started populating the older photos that had been missing! Woohoo! I hope this fix helps you too.

I just downloaded the latest updates for Catalina 10.15.4 and my iPhone 11 Pro Max 13.4 and it appears that I can now sync my photos that I have arranged in subfolders on my Mac to my phone once again. Glad to finally have this back...

Hi! My problem is at PLACES tab. I used to work with Photos very good until upgraded to Catalina. I have a photo library with 3TB of photos, over 140.000 photos, on an external enclosure with SSD Samsung 2TB * 4.

I have of course REFERENCED library because I don't want my photos as I have them organized in the external disk in folders as I want, to be copied to the Photo Library. I want them there at their original location.

But this is a problem for Photos and Catalina because now the PLACES tab do not appear any photo because there is a BUG with Photos software after going to Catalina.

I did Consolidate some photos (to copy them to the library ....) and those photos DID APPEAR in the Places tab.

But in the grid photo view when i click "Get Info" on ANY of my 140K+ photos I can see the location in the mini map.

So the location from the photos is there , as there is the BUG with PLACES in Photos under Catalina.

Hope it will be fixed soon, APPLE PEOPLE

Thank you

Major photo issues as well with my iMac running 10.15.4 Catalina. My icloud photos show up on my iphone and ipad, but my iMac does not sync at all. It's almost as if I have two photo libraries. In other words, photos from my ios devices are not syncing with my imac. All are newer devices with updated software and I tried all the recommended answers.

I am trying to ditch google photos, but so far I am not having a good time.

Totally agree - photos is really badly broken on Catalina - speed to load on external drives. Lack of sync to iCloud, frequent crashes.

it is almost unusable. Sadly I got all my 1.3tb of photos transferred to iCloud and stopped google - I have originals on two external drives one on MacBook Pro and the other on a Mac mini but keeping them up to date is painful to say the least. Yes I have them all in small format on my iPad and iPhone but I don’t trust Apple to keep my originals safe so I want them downloading to my two external drives.

also 2Tb limit on iCloud space is getting tight - particularly if I lose a photos library on and external drive and have to restock when it says I don’t have enough space.

i know Apple are not on this thread but I hope someone in Apple is taking notice of the many problems they have created for their loyal customers.

After updating to Catalina, Icloud doesn't accept the Apple password that is used by all other devices just fine, the cpu and cooler are working overdrive because some updating programme is caught in an endless death circle, you can watch battery being drained in the process, Foto app is hung up rearranging all my pics I an way I never asked for. Says, don't unplug the Macbook pro, but didn't get it done in 48 hours, and a few more bugs...

Just call it what it is. Catalina is a DISASTER! And asking users, who EXPLICITELY bought expensive Macs because they had a history of quality to fumble with Terminal programming to solve something that wasn't broken before is pretty cheeky. If IOS is no better than Windows might as well lower the price accordingly!

Am I fed up? You bet.

Initially when upgrading to Catalina late last year the Photos app occasionally misbehaved but using the repair tool seemed to sort that out. The latest update 10.15.5, 2 weeks ago, changed all that and photos app became unusable with blank thumbnails appearing after editing and the laptop crashing - early 2015 MacBook air - at least twice a day. A 2 hour phone call with an Apple technician did nothing to resolve the problem. I was using a 500gb ssd scan disk external hard drive formatted to FAT. I tried using the internal drive on the laptop but had the same issues. Eventually I reset the laptop to factory spec which in my case was El Capitan and upgraded to Mojave. Unfortunately the Mojave operating system didn't recognise the external hard drive contents saying that I had to upgrade Photos, which means going back to Catalina. No Chance. Accessing Time machine was not possible either as that would have meant up grading to Catalina also. So I opened the external drive, went to look at packages and transferred all 12,000 photos (mostly in RAW) back onto my laptop. I lost all the metadata in the process; 5 years of carefully processed and tagged natural history photos from insects to birds and locations. Fortunately I had also backed up to Google Photos but as jpegs, at least the metadata is there if only in a less accessible format. Mojave works almost flawlessly, no crashes, no lost data etc. For me, I'm done with Apple and my next laptop will be a windows operating system.

Look for a process called TrustedPeersHelper - if it is running flat our or any more than a couple of percent then you have an issue with your apple ID on one or more devices. In my case my apple Watch was going flat in no time at all., when the process was running at just short of 100% on my MacBook Pro.

Log out of your apple ID everywhere and log back in one device at a time. I had to do this several times but since everything eventually sorted themselves out my Watch now runs for 2 days, my iPhone 11 has great battery life and my MacBook Pro is usable again because TPH is not running any higher than 0% - 1%.

My only problem now is the MacBook photos app which is a nightmare with 1.3Tb of photos. Hope this helps. Kev

I agree 100% with your final sentence. I certainly hope that Apple is taking notice of loyal customers' problems.

After installing Catalina it appeared that my Photos library on external drive was not updating. The size and modified date remained constant despite adding hundreds of new images. That has changed since the last OS update and Photos library on external drive is again showing that changes are being recognised.

However, I have a new and worrying problem that I have never seen before. A small number of photos appear to have duplicated automatically, but the second copy is damaged, or in some cases looks like a composite of several images. Luckily I have always exported photos to several external drives and non-Apple cloud services as individual files. If iCloud is having new problems I have historical copies of my precious photos.

Finally, I solved this problem.

I use MacBook pro Retina Early 2015 which updated to Catalina and photos stored in NAS(QNAP TS-231). After using Catalina, My Photos library was looked like broken when I edited pictures contained Live photos. So, I guessed the origin of problem is Permission for network or SMB. Because, there is no problem when I use photos with internal drive.

After guessed the origin, I give the Full disk access permission to VideoToolbox, FaceCore, MediaConversionSevice, Mediakit, and VCPHEVC which are located under /Library/Frameworks/... This way will solve the problem who are experiencing like me.

My English speaking and writing are very awful, but I think you can understand what I want to say to everyone. Thanks to reading this reply.

This update to Catalina is not only blocking any edits in Photos, but I'm unable to send photos via email. Cannot find a fix to this problem. More than 7,000 photos - not able to edit, send or use at all. Help!!