Photos app stuck on "Restoring" Screen after Catalina Update

Thank you SenseOfLife, this solution worked for me. After letting it go through the whole process twice (took many days) I was about to give up on Photos altogether (I still might!). Then I tried changing permissions to add Administrator and Apply to enclosed items. I have 1.3 TB and it took less than an hour, I re-started and opened Photos and for the first time, the app just opened without having to restore or anything. A frustrating waste of many hours, but thank you for sharing your solution. It is crazy that others in the thread who have been on the phone with Apple are not given the same solution. And it is really annoying that Apple forced these new "features" on everyone using their app. We should be able to opt out of the face recognition and other new "organization" features. And one last word of warning, if you ask Photos to show your photo in Finder, you will see that the app has organized them in a completely random way, there seems to be zero logic to how the files are organized which will have serous implications should you want to move them to a more logic based organizer later. In other words, if Photos is your only method of archiving all of your pics, that I can see, there will be no way to do a wholesale data dump to a different program later in life the next time Apple adds debilitating features. Hopefully I am wrong and welcome contradiction....Thank you again SenseOfLife!

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?

My library is on an external drive that I just purchased a few weeks ago, and formatted to APFS.

As you are getting permission errors - have you tried to set the "Ignore ownership on this volume" flag?

Select your drive in the Finder, open the info with ⌘I, then click the padlock at the bottom if the Info , enter the password, and click the "Ignore Ownership" checkmark.

The external volume must not be used for Time Machine backups ar have any other backup software installed.

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.

After the Catalina update 10.15.1 the Wi-Fi connection was broken and my photos external hard drive got stuck restoring. I used the hotspot on my phone to get around the Wi-Fi problem. I gave the external hard drive admin read and write permission. That took over an hour. I ejected the hard drive. Updated to 10.15.2. Mounted the hard drive. Now everything looks OK. I did have to change the preferred networks order in network system preferences.

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!

I had same 0% message, but when I turned off real time Avira anti virus scanning the restoration process kicked into life and completed in minutes. Library 100Gb+

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

Apple isn't here. We're all users like yourself. However, we will try to help.

Download and run Etrecheck. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support  to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

Copy the report

and use the Add Text button to include the report in your reply. How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting Large Amounts of Text, i.e. an Etrecheck Report

Before running Etrecheck assign Full Disk Access to Etrecheck so that it can get additional information from the Console and log files for the report:

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine what's causing the problem..

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...

My issue is that the Photos kept saying no permission and ask to repair the library to no avail in my time capsule after Catalina update. In the end I moved the library (400gb) to a hard disk that I formatted using my MBA (Catalina). The Photos restored the library and opened it successfully. Then I move back the library back to my time capsule and it works.

Give it a try.