Photos app stuck on “Restoring from iCloud”

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Level 1

28 points

Photos app stuck on “Restoring from iCloud”

I have about 110,000 photos and videos in my Photos library, synced to my Mac with iCloud with "download originals" turned on. Sync was working fine until a few days ago, about a week after installing Catalina.

I accidentally opened my Photos library from a networked Mac and closed it. It didn't appear to cause any problems, but the next time I opened Photos on the local Mac, it gave me a "repairing library" progress bar. That eventually completed and all my photos showed up. So far so good. But since then (11 days ago), it has not downloaded any new photos from iCloud.

In "All Photos" view, at the bottom where it would normally say "Downloading x new items", instead it says "Restoring from iCloud...":

Above that it lists numbers of photos and vidoes, which are wrong. When I first open Photos for just a second it shows slightly lower numbers, which are the numbers of photos and videos actually in the library. Then the "restoring" message comes up and it switches to a higher number, which is still lower than the number shown on my phone and other iCloud synced libraries. The photos missing from this library show up fine on those devices.

The iMac has been on and attached to a fast and reliable internet connection the whole time. I assumed it would resolve on its own, but it has now been 11 days and it's getting inconvenient to not have access to new photos.

When this problem began I was running macOS 10.15.1. I have since upgraded to 10.15.2, and the problem persists.

I've tried restarting and I've tried turning "Download originals to my Mac" off and back on, to no avail.

On day 8 I opened Photos while holding command-option to rebuild the library. It took about 9 hours, after which it went right back to the same "Restoring from iCloud..." message.

Has anybody else run into this problem? Anything I can do to get it back to normal syncing?

iMac with Retina 5K display, macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 16, 2019 1:57 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

lindros2

Level 2

194 points

Dec 24, 2019 4:24 PM in response to rtempchin

Photos - and iCloud Photos - are a QA disaster for Apple.

They have long been an issue. I have posted and read over 200 posts on the topic.

Yet Apple has done nothing to improve the reliability.

Instead? They replaced the actual numerical status with the "Restoring from iCloud", which is more useless, more frustrating, and has zero confidence of when it will be complete. One hour? Two days? A month?

I've resorted to using iCloud.com photos, which removes a ton of functionality. It's pathetic.

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Answer 2

Cmaddock

Level 1

19 points

Dec 25, 2019 8:02 AM in response to rtempchin

I ran Photos for the first time in a longtime yesterday and it of course said my files where corrupt or something like that. It ran a repair and said it couldn’t be fixed. I ran another repair and then it loaded my photos and ever since it has said “Restoring from iCloud”. Is their any way to status that this is actually doing something. It has been running for nearly 24 hours.

I did make a major mistake in that I transferred some pictures from my phone and it deleted them from my phone. Now they are stuck in the photos app that isn’t syncing correctly. I am so tired of the photos app. The only reason I am in this predicament is that photos won’t completely sync at all with my phone. So tired. I am going to have to figure out a different solution b/c of my huge photo library. Just work.

Any help to see if this is working would be much appreciated. I am worried it needs some sort of permissions and b/c I haven’t granted it, the photos library will just stay where it is at.

Thank you.

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Photos app stuck on “Restoring from iCloud”

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