Photos on macOS Catalina - Unable to Upload

I would have tried that, other than the fact that, with over 80,000 photos and videos comprising about 600 GB, that's not going to be real high on my list.

What I did just discover which seemed to work, is this:

• go into this "Unable to Upload" folder, Deleting the pictures therein (which caused them to disappear from that folder), and then
• from the Deleted Photos folder, select Recover (which didn't cause them to re-appear in the Unable to Upload folder, which is good, because they were never "Unable to Upload" in the first place).

Once I did this for all 14 photos, that Unable to Upload folder disappeared. I did it one-by-one, to make very sure they had all correctly returned to my iCloud Photo Library.

So that seems to be a fix. Have no idea how this happened in the first place. Just more Apple bugs. And hey, the Photos application just now crashed again, for no apparent reason. Wonderful. At least this particular issue didn't reappear after Photos re-opened. Small victories. 🙄

So aaaanyways, if/when anyone else experiences this issue, give the above a try.

Did you just upgrade to Catalina? In Catalina some image file formats are no longer supported, that could be used in the previous system versions. You could try to export the "Unable to upload" photos from your library, delete them and reimport the exported photos. This usually convert them them to a supported format. This is described here: About the status bar in Photos for macOS - Apple Support

(see the section about "unable to upload").

Are the two smart albums mentioned in this document empty?

About the status bar in Photos for macOS

Check the status. If you are having referenced files in your Library, the will stop the upload. Photos on Catalina seems to be trying to upload them, even if it is not supposed to upload them.

Yes, when created, both such smart folders are both empty, returning no results. Because those photo are still, and have been for years, in my iCloud Library.

Is there some way to actually get rid of this system-created folder of "Unable to Upload" photos shown in the left bar (just like this: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250760718)? And the status that still reads "Upload failed for 14 items".

Edit: I even just added an image to my Photos on Mac, and took a photo with my iPhone, and they both synced across to the other nearly immediately. And yet still, the bogus "Upload failed for 14 items" persists.

Edit2: Looking at https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/, it shows for Photos as "Resolved Issue", which usually means "you will continue to see problems for a while longer while whatever we just did cascades across servers", so whatever was the problem on the server end was also likely the cause of the effect I'm now seeing in the Photos app. I'm going to bed now and will just hope that this will have sorted itself out by the morning, unlike the several other intractable issues with Apple software that I was trying to sort out when this one popped up... I fully anticipate that those will likely continue to linger around, unaddressed by Apple, for years more to come. I have pretty given up hope on those, and Apple itself.

I too have this problem after buying a new MacBook Pro 16" and restoring from by timemachine backup.

I noticed my mac is trying to upload all the photos again. And some of them do show up in the new Unable to Upload folder....

Can anyone help?

Yes and No. So I brought the new MBP 16" which came with Catalina. And restoring from a time machine backup that is from Mojave.

I managed to make Unable to Upload disappear by turning off and on iCloud photos. Some of them are screenshots on my (recent) iPhone and some photos taken by iPhone. No reason for them to be incompatible.

My current problem is it is still stuck uploading... It was on 50000 and went down to 49985 photos to upload after it has done uploading all the iCloud Drive files. However it seems to be stuck again. (I did a restore on my email as a lot of files weren't getting downloaded and has no content besides the title in my email app after restoring.) Maybe it will get going again after the email, but I have no idea...... Just playing the waiting games for now.

I am also compressing a 1TB file and CPU resources are taken by the zipping app. Maybe the upload would only run when the cores are idle?

I've got the same exact problem, which just appeared tonight, right after Photos inexplicably crashed.

My Mac is about a year old, and I upgraded to Catalina months ago (and still wish I hadn't).

Anyways, same exact problem as this poster (in my case, a random subset of 14 photos out of my iCloud Photo Library of 90,000 photos and videos), but I can assure you, it has nothing to do in my case (and very likely the OP's case) with "unsupported file formats", Time Machine backups, or anything else. It's just yet another glaring, widespread unfixed bug in Apple's ever growing trail of them.

I managed to make it go away by deleting the entire photo library and let it redownload.

But I was having problem with it stuck uploading/syncing anyway so I had to do that.

If yours is still uploading maybe wait until it has finished uploading and see if anything changes. Some of the unable to upload photos were uploaded after a while but the rest are just stuck for me.

This person also seems to have had the identical bug, but the thread was closed without any effective solution.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250760718