After upgrading to Catalina, Photos is in a continuous loop of "analyzing scenes, composing layout, detecting duplicates and gathering favorites" . I've let it run for several days and the progress bar has not moved.

Yeah, it does that for a while. Whether "several days" should be enough depends on how many photos and videos are in your library, the speed of your Mac Mini, and whether your Mac is set to sleep at night or just to dim the screen.

AlanM2437 wrote:

... Wish Apple would be more clear with this stuff.

I left a comment about this in the feed back to the Photos User Guide.

if you open page in thePhotos User Guide (Browse and view photos in Photos on Mac - Apple Support) and scroll down to the bottom, you will find two button "Helpful - Yes - No".

If you click "No", you will be asked, how the manual page can be made more helpful. i am using these buttons a lot to point out missing information, that I could not find or that seems to be not clear enough. You may also want to add a comment to ask for a more precise documentation.

Sometimes the information is there, but in an unexpected place. It is a pity, that there is no longer a search tool in the user guide.

I would not worry too much about that. The "analyzing scenes, composing layout, detecting duplicates and gathering favorites" is only necessary to create a stunning layout the "Days" view. It does not prevent you from using Photos. And it will run for a long time and start over whenever you change a favorite mark , import a new photo - anything that might influence the layout of the "curated view" in the Days view. For a large library it may take weeks to finish. On my MacBook Pro the loopp will only stop, when I disconnect my MacBook Pro from the power adapter. Then I will see finally:

As soon as I connect the MacBook Pro again to Power the loop will start again. It has been running since I upgraded to Catalina, when it first came out.

Since it is an ever running routine never ending process, It would better, if Photos did not display this message.

léonie wrote:

Mark, has your library already finished "Curating"? If yes, how long did it take?

It would help, if we could compare notes on the library size and the expected duration for the "Curating".

léonie, I run Catalina only on one underpowered test system, which I look at only when I want to test something. I don't know how long "Curating" took, or even if it is complete. (I saw one claim that curation starts over on addition of new photos or editing old ones, so it may literally never be over for an active library.)

When I convert one of my production systems, I'll try to keep track of how long the initial curation continues.

Thank you Mark. Last week I thought the "curating" had finished, because Photos had been showing "Your photos curated", only to discover that mag-safe power adapter had become disconnected from my MacBook Pro.. As soon as I connected the MBP to power the curating loop started again. It feels like an ever running process. Then the message is redundant and could be removed.

Mark, has your library already finished "Curating"? If yes, how long did it take?

It would help, if we could compare notes on the library size and the expected duration for the "Curating".