Photos update taking forever in macOS Catalina

my photos after "successful" Catalina upgrade #1 (meaning there are lots of problems, but the upgrade process seems concluded) has now been running for 2 weeks almost 100% of the time... "on power" and just stuck at 25% in a seemingly endless loop "gathering favorites, analyzing scenes, detecting duplicates, , curating best photos, composing layout".

How long should this go on for? i have 114GB of photos.

Stuck at 4% is not expected. When you speak of your photos update, do you mean:

1. The process which updates Photos to open for the first time since Catalina and show photos under Catalina's version
2. The process after (1) has completed that updates people, searches for duplicates, etc?

If it is 1 then you need expert help

If it is 2 then EITHER quit photos and look at it after 3 or hours, OR minimise photos and do the same. One, or others maybe both, of those methods work

I'm currently in the process of upgrading an old 170GB iPhoto library with about 41,090 photos, 296 videos with Catalina macOS Photos. It has been running for about 8-9 hours. At first I was getting % complete until about 10% and now it only show this:

The only thing that tells me something is still happening is by looking at the Activity Monitor app which shows me 2 Photos processes are still taking CPU cycles:

If these processes are still running, I'm assuming I just need to wait for them to complete. BTW, I'm running on an old iMac Retina 5K, Late 2015 with a 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 with 32GB of memory.

Guess we'll see how everything looks tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed.

Could you create an empty album and add all your photo's to this album by dragging them into it?

This forces Photos to make a "change" to all photos and usually forces the sync state to be rechecked.

I have had a lot of different issues with iPhotos, Aperture, Photos which even caused me to lose my whole library (lucky I have multiple backups). So I'd like to investigate this, it would be nice if such issues will be fixed over time.

Currently I run into a related issue where the sync gets stuck with: "Downloading 41 originals". (FB7411739)

Adding them to an album and let it sync brought it down from 73 to 41.

Also filed a report to Apple that Burst images even crash Photos due an underlying issue where the database has another value than the interface expects. This even makes it impossible to export burst pictures in some cases. (FB7411493)

After removing all photos from MacbookA (full sync) the empty library synced correctly to MacbookB (optimized sync).

My iPhone got stuck around 12000 pictures. Turned off iCloud photos, no change, then turned it back on and it started to continue removing photos till around 3800 photos and started uploading those.

Still waiting for it to complete. Will let you guys know in what state I ended.

For the ones who wonder how I exported all albums, I used this applescript in Photos/PhotosExporter.applescript from:

https://github.com/mariusvw/apple-scripts

(Thanks Jacques & Léonie, added to github add some more features to it to make it easier ;-))

iOS uploaded its contents (where ever that got locked up). MacbookA loads the images but hangs on downloading originals (3909) and just before it said that it uploaded 24 pictures. I wonder where those came from since I removed the library to ensure I would start empty.

Now MacbookB downloaded everything correctly.

I am going to export all those again and remove them to see if iOS catches up to be empty too.

Ok, exported all photos, stranded in this situation:

iCloud: empty

MacbookA: Photos crashed, restarted, empty

MacbookB: empty

iOS: empty

Next test is to re-enable it on all devices and see if it will remain empty and stable.

Imo, this is not the correct way to solve the problem but after noticing corrupted images I found this a solution to live with.

Sadly even when starting fresh, things seem to lock up, current state:

iOS: 127 photos (57 downloading)

MacOS: 127 photos (1 downloading)

iCloud: 127 photos

So it seems that iCloud holds the right pictures but the devices don't get fully in sync when "downloading originals" is enabled.

Also, even with 4 small albums, when I deleted one image the MacOS Photos crashed.

Happens since the synchronisation is stuck.

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000611ed91c2ff0

Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Signal: Segmentation fault: 11

Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 0xb

Terminating Process: exc handler [2578]

Will keep on trying different scenarios till this is fixed or has a clear solution.

Hello guys, same behavior here, fresh install of Catalina. I have 16000 pictures and 500 videos in the library. It took one day to sync in the Mac and a a few hours to detect the faces of the people, but I still see this Gathering Favorites, keep the Mac plugged ... . I let it a few nights working without opening photos and the progress bar is stucked. I don’t see this behavior in my iPhone or iPad with iOS 13. Another point I observed is that the library in iCloud is like 90Gb and in the Mac almost 200GB. I will try to see if creating new albums is helping to force the sync. Let you know.

I created new albums and the gathering favorites, detecting duplicates... still present.

yesterday Photos got frozen when I was seeing pictures, then I repaired the library, synced again,... and same behavior. This Catalina is quite buggy.

Finally completed the conversion and all looks ok. Actually showing 40893 Photos. Took about 8 hours to convert from an HD connected via USB 3.0 adapter. Hopefully this gives you an idea of how long conversion should take.

This discussion is not directly related to converting older libraries, it is more about the iCloud integration.

Converting older libraries can take a very long time indeed, but it eventually completes correctly.

Problem still remains that if you use iCloud with other devices that the synchronisation fails and even may cause losing data due the originals not being on your computer.

Even making backups from the library makes no difference in that since you only backup the meta-data.

I am not sure of the definition of "eventually completes" ... my MACbook running Catalina has been "scanning" for 6 weeks, and has only completed 2,900 out of 42,000 photos. and it has not completed 1 scan in more than a week.

my issue is NOT with the iCloud, as I do not use it...

my problem is with MAC Catalina Photos library conversion.

Same situation here, I have 91,500 photos, the update bar went to 90% in about 12 hours, and then it didn't move an inch for one week. Something is not right and I don't have much hope in it "eventually completing" on its own.

I also don't use iCloud with Photos.

tk-mac: when you say "2,900 out of 42,000", how did you get those numbers? I can only see an upgrade bar but no numbers.

There's another process that is also running called, "photoanalysisd":