Downloading originals stuck

It’s been more than a week that my photos are stuck at downloading originals (from iCloud). It did download the majority at first but now it’s stuck at the same number.

iPhone 13 Pro, iOS 16

Posted on Mar 2, 2023 5:32 PM

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Posted on Oct 1, 2023 7:40 PM

Select all photos using [command] + [a], then right-click any photo and select [Play Slideshow] from the menu options. For me, all the originals that were stuck at downloading were forced to complete.

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30 replies

Dec 16, 2023 11:56 AM in response to i5Js

All of my devices are up to date. For me, it seems to have broken down with IOS 17.2 on my iPhone 15. (My iPhone 12 still syncs fine). Some people are saying it's because of AppleWatchOS, when they unpair their watch it allegedly starts working fine.


It is frustrating since it's a new iPhone, and syncing music is such a basic feature. However, a lot of people seem to be having this issue. So at least Apple is more likely to look into it. Hopefully this gets fixed soon.

Dec 30, 2023 11:54 AM in response to edwardluna33

This also seems to be an issue even after all of the originals are downloaded. I factory reset my iPad and iPhone and was luckily able to download my photos. (On Mac Sonoma I did have to repair the photo library twice before it worked). However, even with newer photos, it also gets occasionally stuck. Usually a restart fixes the issue, which hints that whatever background process responsible for downloading the originals doesn't kick in when it's supposed to.


It might also be an iCloud issue since this happens on my iPhone too, and with my iPhone I had already downloaded all of my originals before this problem appeared.

Jan 12, 2024 4:02 PM in response to 22PP22

I also had this problem. Turns out, if you're downloading the photo library to an external drive it needs to be formatted In MacOS Extended, or APFS. It's just frustrating that mine downloaded over 100gb worth of photos before going bonk and then I went to settings/iCloud/photos and turned off 'sync this Mac' and upon turning it back on it told me my drive was not formatted properly. So now I'm going through the pain staking process of moving all my files to another drive and reformatting to APFS (for context it was formatted as Ex-Fat). Not sure if this will even fix the downloading issue.


I just don't understand how it worked fine, and then didn't, and then told me my drive was formatted improperly. If that's the case then why did it work for the first 100gb? I even called apple support about the issue and they showed me how to download my photos library to an external drive. They didn't care to mention that the formatting of the drive matters?


I know this is probably apples way of making things difficult so you buy more iCloud storage, but personally, the photos app is so bad on macOS it makes me NOT want to use iCloud at ALL. They really need to work on this app, making it more informative about what it's doing/downloading & why.

Downloading originals stuck

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