After upgrade to MacOS Monterey, Photos will not load -- stuck on "Restoring"

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7 points

After upgrade to MacOS Monterey, Photos will not load -- stuck on "Restoring"

Upgraded my M1 MacBook Pro (2020) to Monterey last weekend, and now I can't access my photos. When I load the Photos app, it says "Restoring..." with a progress bar. I left it for 6 hours the other day, and the progress bar never moved from 0%.

I'm using a very normal/vanilla iCloud photos setup -- we all have iOS devices, my photo library on the Mac is not stored on an external or anything like that (which is what a lot of the topics I find involve). It's all very default/out of the box. The hard drive on my MacBook Pro has hundreds of GBs of free space.

How do I fix this?

MacBook Pro (2020 and later)

Posted on Nov 5, 2021 6:27 AM

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Answer 1

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rogersmj1 Author

Level 1

7 points

Nov 9, 2021 7:52 AM in response to Lee_ms

After nearly two full days of "Restoring" sitting at 0%...I gave up. I rebooted the computer (for a different reason, but not the first time since this all started), and didn't touch Photos for awhile. When I opened up Photos again...all my photos were there. So the problem fixed itself.

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Answer 2

Lee_ms

Community Specialist

Nov 6, 2021 9:26 AM in response to rogersmj1

Hi rogersmj1,

We see you are trying to restore your photos from iCloud to your Mac. Although you didn't see any progress during those first 6 hours, it could still be working to restore your content. I can take quite a while for this process to begin and finish. It will depend on how many photos you have, whether the application is running or not and your internet connection.

If you can confirm that the photos are in your iCloud storage by seeing them on another device or on iCloud website from a computer, we'd recommend trying the process again. You can learn how to get photos setup on your Mac here: Set up and use iCloud Photos

Take care.

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Answer 3

Nov 6, 2021 9:31 AM in response to rogersmj1

How big is your library (how much space does it take in iCloud)

It can take a long time to sync a large library (much longer than 6 hours). My 5000 item 50GB library (small) took 48 hours. It is common for the progress indicator not to update for long periods of time also.

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Answer 4

rogersmj1 Author

Level 1

7 points

Nov 7, 2021 7:43 AM in response to TonyCollinet

Wow, that's a long time for a 50GB library. Mine is around 350GB; after 6 hours I would have expected to see *some* progress, I'm on a really fast fiber connection and I can easily download 500GB in an hour if the source supports it.

I just have never run into this problem on any prior OS upgrades, so I'm still a bit worried something is wrong. But I will leave it open for a day or so and see if it gets anywhere.

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Answer 5

rogersmj1 Author

Level 1

7 points

Nov 8, 2021 5:32 AM in response to Lee_ms

After leaving Photos open for 24 hours, it is still at 0% restoring. The photos are in icloud -- all my other devices (iPhone, iPads, etc) work fine and show the photos. It is only my Mac that has broken and will not allow me to access my photos after upgrading to Monterey.

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Answer 6

Nov 8, 2021 6:21 AM in response to rogersmj1

The first thing it has to do is compare what is in iCloud with what is on your system library. This needs a complete download of iCloud - just to work out what needs to be synchronised.

You have 350GB - 24 hours is simply no where near enough for the speed this system works at. The only solution here is patience - a lot of it.

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Answer 7

Nov 7, 2021 8:01 AM in response to rogersmj1

It seems to be limited by apples servers, rather than your own internet speed.

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After upgrade to MacOS Monterey, Photos will not load -- stuck on "Restoring"

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