Photos on Mac stopped updating all of a sudden

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Level 5

7,253 points

Photos on Mac stopped updating all of a sudden

So my iCloud photos was syncing just fine on my Mac but stopped about a week ago. The status bar on the bottom says 'Updated just now' but the photos don't match what's in the cloud. It's missing the last 7 days of photos. I was installing some software around the time it stopped working and my hard drive was getting full (the joys of only having a 128GB hard drive) but I since uninstalled the software and have around 7GB free so I wouldn't;t think that storage space is the issue?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.4

Posted on Jul 12, 2022 8:45 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Matti Haveri

Level 6

16,531 points

Jul 13, 2022 4:57 AM in response to apfelkopf

> could I move the Photo library to an external drive to free up space on my MacBook and point the Photos app to that location?

Yes. That's what I do. But remember to format the external drive as APFS (SSD) or Mac OS Extended (HDD), both with GUID partition scheme because Photos.app, Final Cut Pro etc require that.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

197,089 points

Jul 13, 2022 5:36 AM in response to apfelkopf

As Matti said, yes. Here are Apple's instructions on how to prepare the external volume: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

It is essential that you can set the "Ignore ownership on this volume" flag. Photos does not need it, but a volume, where you cannot set this lag will not be suitable and cause problems with the file ownership. Stetting this flag is a test,. if the volume has issues.

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Answer 3

apfelkopf Author

Level 5

7,253 points

Jul 15, 2022 4:58 AM in response to Matti Haveri

So I was able to move my library and link the Photos app to the new location. However the new problem now is that iCloud Photos only works with the system photo library (that's the message I get when trying to enable iCloud Photos inside the Photos app). Is there a way to make the library on the external drive the 'System Library'?

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Answer 4

léonie

Level 10

197,089 points

Jul 15, 2022 6:59 AM in response to apfelkopf

If your Photos Library has been in iCloud you could have simply created a new, empty library on your external volume and make it the system Photos Library and your iCloud Photos Library. That would have saved you the lengthy upload of the moved Library to iCloud. ICloud will not recognize the moved Library as your previous iCloud Library. It will upload all photos again and merge them into the existing cloud library. This will take a very long time for such a large library.

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Answer 5

léonie

Level 10

197,089 points

Jul 12, 2022 10:43 AM in response to apfelkopf

7GB of free storage is probably not enough - on my smallest Mac with the least storage the syncing is pausing, if the free storage is dropping below 20GB. Try to free more storage, if possible.

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Answer 6

apfelkopf Author

Level 5

7,253 points

Jul 13, 2022 4:18 AM in response to léonie

Thank you for your reply. To be honest, I never had more than 9GB of free storage available so maybe I'll try to get to that amount of free space again and see if they start updating.

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