Photos and iCloud albums not synced

Question

Photos and iCloud albums not synced

The albums in my MacBook Pro all report having zero pictures, but the albums in iCloud do contain all the pictures I originally put in them.

The Photos app started working funny about a month ago, missing pictures and failing to download full resolution images and the like. I have reinstalled Mojave which did not help. I ran the Photos "Repair" function, and when it was done all of my albums were there but each reported zero pictures. Photos is now set to keep full resolution images locally on my MBP. I have plenty of storage available.

The library is large with about 102,000 images. The iCloud photos reports the existence of all the photos, but now my MBP says I only have 35,000.

This is a MBP mid 2014 running Mojave. It has a 1 TB SSD of which 600 GB free. My iCloud account is 2 TB of which 1.5 TB is free. I've waited a week now with the computer always on and a good wifi connection. I reboot about once a day. The MacBook albums all remain empty.

MacBook Pro Retina

Posted on May 24, 2020 6:41 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

STCav

Level 2

428 points

May 25, 2020 8:41 AM in response to tugboatcaptain787

If you're happy that the iCloud account is correct but the local Library is faulty, I would create a new Library and synchronise it with iCloud. It should then download everything from iCloud on to your local machine.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert in Photos but having recently made a mess of my local Libraries, this seemed to be the most effective solution.

Reply

Answer 2

May 25, 2020 11:51 AM in response to STCav

This sounds like an excellent approach!

The old (corrupt) library can be left in place while the new one is populated from the iCloud account. I'll start this later today. I expect it should take a few days for the 102,000 items, 500 GB according to iCloud. My 1 TB SSD should have enough room to do this. I'll report back once the big download is going.

Thank you STCav!

Reply

Answer 3

May 31, 2020 8:35 AM in response to tugboatcaptain787

Recreating a new Photos library was helpful. The download went smoothly albeit very slow.

The new library worked ok for a few days after which I started getting errors. Errors like:

"Error Downloading Photo

"An error occurred while downloading a larger version of this photo for editing. Please try again later."

&

"Photos must quit because the photo library has become unavailable or its data is corrupt."

I'm downloading another copy of the Photos library from iCloud.

Reply

Photos and iCloud albums not synced

Similar questions