Photos stuck on "restoring from iCloud"

Are all your photos in iCloud? Check in the Photos.app on your iCloud webpage www.icloud.com .

When you are sure, that all photos and videos are still in iCloud, you could simply download a fresh copy of your Photos Library from iCloud. I have done that aufter each major system upgrade, when my libary go hit by the endless "Restoring".

Try the following:

• Quit Photos, if it is running. Save your current Photos Library on an external drive.
• Launch Photos again, while holding down the options key ⌥ firmly, and release the key, when the dialog to select a library appears.
• Select to create a new library. If you create the library on an external drive, make sure, it is compatible with Photos, as described here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
• When the new, empty library opens in Photos, make it your System Photos Library in the Photos > Settings > General: Use as System Photos Library.
• Then make the new library your iCloud Photos Library in the Photos > Settings > iCloud tab and wait for the photos to come back from iCloud.

This method is the fasted way to rebuild an iCloud Photos Library. All media items and the albums and folders will be restored from iCloud, including the metadata. But the projects are not stored in iCloud, so they will not be come back from iCloud, and Photos will do a new faces scan. Some of the manually added faces may get lost.

I was about to go down this path to fix my Photos Library, but because Photos kept getting stuck changing the System Photos Library to the new Library. I finally just threw away my new Library and chose my old Library again. And after many hours of syncing (the number of photos and videos initially kept lowering!!?!?), my Library is back and in sync with iCloud and no longer is stuck "Restoring from iCloud" for weeks and weeks, actually months.

Hello I just want to thank Leonie for her post. I had somehow removed my photos from the photos library and kept getting stuck trying to restore it. There always seemed to be a step missing in the instructions I found online. Finally today, these worked and my photos are back. Thank you so much Leonie!