Why are my photos not syncing to iCloud on my Mac?

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NeilA1962 Author

Level 1

4 points

Why are my photos not syncing to iCloud on my Mac?

I have recently switched my photos to iCloud, rather than just having them stored locally on my iMac, mainly because I want to be able to access them from my other Apple devices. However not all my photos have uploaded/synchronised with iCloud Photos.

When I open Photos it shows I have 27,757 photos (yes I know that is a lot!), 133 Videos but 23,330 are showing as "On this Mac only".

I have tried stopping and restarting iCloud, and stopping & restarting Photos, and closing my iMac and rebooting, but nothing seems to make these other photos sync at all. many of the photos will have been edited either using the facilities in Photos (or for some of the older ones Some Windows software called DarkRoom, but they are mainly jpeg files, although there will be some DNG or PNG type files (but certainly not 23k of them!)

My Mac is running MacOs Ventura 13.7.4 and although the iMac is a bit old (dates back to 2017) everything else runs and performs fine.

I have 1.5Tb of free space n my iCloud, so I don't think I am short of space to store these photos?

Anyone had a similar issue, and if so how did you solve it?

TIA

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iMac 21.5″ 4K, macOS 13.7

Posted on Mar 14, 2025 4:46 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Richard.Taylor

Level 6

18,313 points

Mar 15, 2025 10:28 AM in response to NeilA1962

23000 is a lot of not working! But we need some information:

Where is your Photos Library? Is it in the Pictures folder on your internal drive, or is it on an external drive? If it's external, how is it formatted? It needs to be formatted in APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format, or there's considerable trouble. Does the drive have Time Machine on it?

When you look at Photos Settings>General, is this Library your System Library?

For me, "Use as System Photos Library" is grayed out, because it already is. Is "Importing>Copy" checked?

I'm concerned that some of your pictures are Referenced, meaning that they are not fully owned and controlled by Photos. Can you make a Smart Album like this?

You can use it to hunt for Referenced picture files. Referenced pictures are not transferred to iCloud. If you have some, we might be able to fix it.

Let us know…

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Why are my photos not syncing to iCloud on my Mac?

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