How long might Photos take opening a 563 GB iPhoto Library in Photos for first time in El Capitan?

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How long might Photos take opening a 563 GB iPhoto Library in Photos for first time in El Capitan?

After successfully copying my 563 GB iPhoto Library to an external drive so I have a back-up, I'm finding it's taking forever to import/convert the original iPhoto Library for first time into Photos. I started process then had to leave. When I returned 5 hours later, I was 59% of the way through the "Preparing Library" stage. But I'm still at "Preparing Library... 59% complete" a full two hours after that. Worried "import" might have stopped. However Activity Monitor shows some Photos activity, second most of CPU usage. Am running El Capitan on an iMac Retina, Late 2014 w/3 TB HD fusion drive (almost 2 TB free) with 16 GB RAM.

Is this Photos normally this slow when opening up a big iPhotos v. 9.6.1 Library for the first time?

TIA

iMac 27″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Oct 19, 2022 6:18 PM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

197,273 points

Oct 19, 2022 9:33 PM in response to TurksCap

With a a library so large you will need to be patient. All tasks for maintaining the library will be slow, updating the library to a new system version, repairing the library, restoring it from a backup.

The first upload to iCloud Photos may take longer than a week. On El Capitan my MacBook Pro needed 10 days to upload a much smaller library, just 200GB.

But working with the individual photos should be much quicker. The library size should not matter, when you are browsing the library or adjusting the images. Only the occasional System upgrades may result in another long update of your library.

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Answer 2

TurksCap Author

Level 1

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Oct 19, 2022 6:58 PM in response to TurksCap

30 minutes later it is still only at 59%, progress bar has not moved for 3 1/2 hours.. Is there any way to know if Photos is hung up and I should quite and start all over? If I have to quit, should I rebuild my iPhoto Library as per ****? The iLife advice predates El Capitan so should be no need to repair permissions, but repairing a database or worse rebuilding a database looks like an extreme measure I should not have had to take if my iPhoto app was working OK.

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Answer 3

TurksCap Author

Level 1

9 points

Oct 19, 2022 8:57 PM in response to TurksCap

Update, it worked! Even though Photos' progress bar was frozen little more than halfway through for 4 hours, Photos suddenly launched, photos started to load, and everything seems to be OK. Go figure.

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How long might Photos take opening a 563 GB iPhoto Library in Photos for first time in El Capitan?

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