Photos app stuck on "Restoring" Screen after Catalina Update

OK, all is well now. All I did was quit all my apps, including Photos. Used Disk Utility > First Aid > Repair Permissions.

Relaunched Photos, and then it only took less than 10 minutes to finish what it was doing.

Now my next question is why do I see duplicates of many photos, some in .JPG format and duplicate in .HEIC format?

After reading all the posts on this thread, I followed the following advice "launch Photos with the Option + Command keys held down".

I then did a restart and started the process of updating Photos library again. I went to bed while it did it's thing. By morning my albums were all present and correct.

Now Photos opens up in less than a second!

Try repairing the library: launch Photos with the Option + Command keys held down,. See if that can get thru the entire library.

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!

See the article https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/mac-help/mchlp1203/mac

Hi.

You have to search for the corrupted photos.

1. create a smart folder with the properties: ISO is empty. If there are photos found, that do not have a propper thumbnail (you will not be able to see them, and they cannot be exported), delete them.
2. if after that the „curation“ is still going:
3. create a smart folder with the properties „camera model is empty“. Do the same as to 1.
4. if the „curation“ has not finished in a few minutes after that you have to search manually for the corrupted photos, as i have described at the post above.

This was the only thing that worked for me.

Have a nice day !!

I've just experienced this for the first time ever.

Starting one or two OS releases ago, each time I update the OS and then open Photos the first time after the update it tells me that it can't locate the library and won't open. The way I got round this was to restart my Mac and, bingo, Photos opens my library.

I thought I'd try the same trick (my iCloud photo library opened fine on my iPad and on iCloud) so I restarted my Mac, opened Photos and now everything is fine. :-)

FYI: My iCloud Photos library is stored on my Mac, not on an external drive.

For now...

"Try repairing the library: launch Photos with the Option + Command keys held down"

Thanks for this ! The repair ran to 100% completion in a few minutes on the MBP 16,1 but then did not progress further. Already 1 hour looking like this:

If the Mack went to sleep it started over. My photos are on an external drive. After I gave it admin permissions it loaded for about 10 minutes then finished restoring.

To update on my previous post. The repairing remained at 0% for about 3 hours, then started to count and finished within another 10 hours. The library then just worked fine, but after closing Photos and restarting the computer, the same procedure started all over again, although this time the total time needed was "only" eleven hours. Looking into the library folder, it seems the files psi.sqlite, psi.sqlite-wal, Photos.sqlite-shm and Phtos.sqlite.lock were changed within the first few minutes, and then it took almost elven hours to modify Photos.sqlite and Photos.sqlite-wal. As far as I can see, nothing else was modified.

This was, apparently, caused by a failed video upload from my Mac. It wasn't a large video file (88MB), but big enough that it corrupted my library's sync with iCloud. This is now the 50th problem I've had with iCloud Photos, and it's quite upsetting.

Try SenseOfLife's fix from this topic: Photos app stuck on "Restoring" Screen after Catalina Update

You were told wrong. It's perfectly OK to have the library on an external HD as long as that drive is formatted as shown in this screenshot:

and connected to the Mac by cable.

More information can be found here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

It is not in the Disk Utility, it is in the Get Info window. Right click on the disk in your finder and go to Get Info. It should be at the bottom of the window, you will likely need to unlock the disk to make changes.