Photos stalls and won't download originals photos from iCloud, takes forever or longer/never
Ok I spent about a month solid (after about a year or two) trying to figure out why I iCloud won't DL all my original iPhone photos and videos and keeps stalling endlessly despite proper Preferences etc. I learned 3 things
- GOOD: in Terminal enter: sudo renice -n -20 -p INSERT PID (whole number alone) HERE. Ex. sudo renice -n -20 -p 777. This speeds up the acquisition service(s): photoanalysisid +/- mediaanalysisid, Photos, cloudd. Also kill GooglePhotos or other apps that compete. Activity Monitor is key to this step.
- BETTER: another kind user rec'd making a SmartFolder and dragging all the media to force DL to SharedFolder (caveat: only 999 photos at a time). This works with one exception which is THE PROBLEM = BIG FILES - too big for iCloud processing: see next.....
- BEST: Given #2 I also made tried making my iPhone DL all originals and THEN I found it was stalling on a video which was I didnt know I had - it was 45 minutes of the inside of my pocket (it said "over 15 minutes - will be trimmed" but STALLED HERE. This is where iCloud gets hung up - on single BIG videos. Once I deleted that from my iPhone everything started DL-ing immediately! I kept DL-ing the rest to a SmartFolder (again limit 999 pics/vids at a time)... I had only 10k so only had to do it 10x...
BOOM
Bottom line: Use your iPhone to look at all your videos you want to download and if there are long ones this is where the problem is..... I guess if there was a way to DL only photos or if there were SmartFolder criteria for size that would work too......
Good luck!
PS if only I can force Photos to scan all the Faces next...... today I tried putting a small fan on my MacBookPro to let it Chillax while trying while I am at work ......
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.5