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I have about 50 000 photos in Apple photos. I sync my phone and several macs with the paid version of iCloud and have plenty of free space. On one of my macs, the Photos app has been stuck with "Uploading 41 Items" for months. All other synchronisation seems to work fine.
My instinct is that there is something broken with one or more of these 41 items, but I cannot identify which items they are.
Any tips on how to get this unstuck?
Have you tried a smart album with the rule "Photo is unable to upload"?
try to find all items, that are neither photos nor videos, for example audio files.
Use smart albums to weed out files with a suspicious format. This can be done by searching with a smart album to search for the filename extensions. An example is here:
How to Weed out Legacy Media in Photos for Mac - Apple Community
Which system version do you have installed? If you are now using macOS 10.15 Catalina, Photos is no longer able to work with PDF files - you should also remove all videos and image files that can no longer be opened by Preview or QuickTime Player. I have removed all videos with a codec that is neither HEVC nor H.264, all images with the filename extension PICT or BMP.
You can also try to look at the caches inside the Photos Library package, but be very careful, when you try that and do not modify anything.
How to check, which Items are currently being uploaded - Apple Community
Have you tried a smart album with the rule "Photo is unable to upload"?
try to find all items, that are neither photos nor videos, for example audio files.
Use smart albums to weed out files with a suspicious format. This can be done by searching with a smart album to search for the filename extensions. An example is here:
How to Weed out Legacy Media in Photos for Mac - Apple Community
Which system version do you have installed? If you are now using macOS 10.15 Catalina, Photos is no longer able to work with PDF files - you should also remove all videos and image files that can no longer be opened by Preview or QuickTime Player. I have removed all videos with a codec that is neither HEVC nor H.264, all images with the filename extension PICT or BMP.
You can also try to look at the caches inside the Photos Library package, but be very careful, when you try that and do not modify anything.
How to check, which Items are currently being uploaded - Apple Community
Then the problem might be the videos. The QuickTime videos with the "MOV" extension may be also using legacy codecs. Are all your videos showing either "HEVC" or "H.264" in the Info as the codec? The compatible video formats are described in this list for iMovie:
About incompatible media in iMovie for macOS - Apple Support
You can see the codec in the info panel for a photo to the left of the camera icon:
Thanks for your advice. I was very optimistic when I saw and tried these, but alas, no result.
I am on Catalina.
I went through my library and weeded out all legacy file types. All i have left now is jpg, jpeg, heic and mov.
I also checked the caches according to the linked article. My cache directory has only folders, no files at all.
But it still says Uploading 41 Items…
This was it! Thanks a lot for the help and patience.
Three of my hundreds of videos turned out to actually be .avi files renamed (for some reason) to .mov. Removing them cleaned the syncing problem.
Thank you!
You're welcome 😊
Apple Photos stuck uploading forever
