Photos app stuck on "Restoring" Screen after Catalina Update

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.

My Photos library (~350Gb, 68,000+ photos and 1,100+ videos) is on the built-in drive of my 2019 MacBook Air. It was stuck on "curating" etc. for about 10 days after I upgraded to Catalina. I tried repairing the library, and it has now been "Restoring from iCloud" - with the progress bar filled in all the way but never completing - ever since (more than two weeks). Last week, I tried changing the Admin permissions on my Pictures folder, applying the new permissions to the contents, and there was slight progress. Although none of the pictures I have taken since November 14 (upgrade day) have appeared, the count of photos and videos now changes to match the count on my iPhone and iPad (albeit after several hours, and only after the app has run for a few second).

I just tried changing the Admin permissions from "Read" to "Read/Write" for the entire SSD, but apparently I don't have the right permissions to do that. Given that I am the only person who uses this computer and I'm working in the only user account on the machine, I'm confused about who exactly would have permission to do that.

Any suggestions will be much appreciated.

Guess what? Same freaking problem here... updated to catalina... At first Photos was acting normally, but then I noticed that my latest photos aren't downloading from iCloud. And at the bottom of my "all Photos" page there's a message that says "Restoring from iCloud". It's been sitting there for about 4 hours (Just to download the last 10 photos taken?).

Awesome sauce, apple!

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.

@old toad - this doesn't help.

Unless this is tested, this can actually corrupt the photo library FURTHER.

I now have this issue - also - on Catalina.

Photos for Mac (and iCloud Photos) is one of the most poorly tested services - that we pay for via iCloud storage. And it is the one that breaks most often.

And Apple iCloud has been a reliability disaster the past few weeks*. If Apple is going to broadcast to Wall Street that "services" are driving revenue, they need to replace whatever imbecile is running it now.

*Look at iCloud service status [link removed]

The exact same thing was happening to me, but I didn't check or uncheck any boxes in System Preferences or edit the permissions... I was running Photos off of a 4 TB Western Digital HDD... which was slightly slow to begin with, since it was an HDD. After I updated to Catalina, the "Restoring: 0%" issue arose. I did a little research, and determined I should probably get an SDD to run Photos more smoothly overall, and having a drive that can read/write faster than my spinning drive was just generally good idea.

I got a SanDisk which was preconfigured and ready to read Mac's computer language. I plugged in both my WD drive and the new SanDisk drive at the same time, and dragged & dropped the Photos App from the WD drive to the SanDisk. It took about 14 hours to completely transfer everything (almost 1.5 TBs). I was worried that it might not work at first because for almost an hour and a half it said "preparing to transfer Photos" so I thought it would freeze or crash.

I let my computer take a break overnight, and the next morning, plugged in the SanDisk again, and tried to open Photos. It took about 8 - 10 mins for it to restore (it started with "Restoring: 0%" again...) but Photos is up and running again!

I'm not sure if what SenseOfLife suggested would have worked because I didn't find this until after the transfer was completed, but upgrading to a faster drive might help fix your problem too.

Catalina changed the folder and naming structure of all media stored by Photos application.

That is why it takes so long to "restore" your library. Because Catalina wants to RENAME all your media files to random names !

Beware! After this "upgrade" you won´t be able to recognize your folder MASTERS structure anymore!

Because now they are in Originals folder, BUT Catalina "played" with the older logical subfolder structure (as was it in MASTERS folder). So now you just see folders from A to Z and from 1 to 9 where ALL your media files ARE RENAMED to random long names.

Now it is nearly impossible to find your media file without PHOTOS app.

That is why I have stopped using Photos app. I want to be able to drag and drop my media files, I want to keep their logical names and date structure.

SamJam:

Which steps exactly? I'm seeing different solutions listed.

In my scenario I have my photo library on the same hard drive as my operating system and not an external.

I've always used either iPhoto or Photos to manage my library and also use iCloud Photos.

I have a progress bar, but it does not show a "percentage" number and does not seem to be moving since the screen shot I show above.

Did you actually leave your Mac on and powered up for "four days"? Or did you quit and shut down your Mac in between sessions?

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?

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!

Photos curating stuck at 90% since Catalina update. Curation been going for 3 months. Tried numerous things.

1) all photos on external hard drive. ( tried multiple hard drives, the main hard drive and a brand new hard drive that I copied photos over to.

2) tried creating a new user, to see if issue with a specific user. No luck.

3) erased my iMac hard drive and reinstalled operating system, hooked up external hard rive with photos, and same problem of curation stuck at 90%.

4) I have admin added on the permissions with ignore ownership checked. No luck.

5) external hard drive was formatted in Mac OS extended (journaled) and the photo library is the only thing on the external drive. 285000 photos and 13000 video clips. (1.7TB)

6)did a disk utility repair. No luck.

7)rebuilt photo library. No luck.

I am curious about one post that said maybe metadata or camera info might be missing and won’t allow completion? How do I find photos missing something the curation process might need to complete? Please let me know how to find and eliminate those photos.

thanks!

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!

I have the same issue, Photos launch repairing process after every new launch and it can take 18-24 hours. My photos are on an external hard drive with all permissions indicated in the first post of that topic. Apple please fix that.

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...

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