Location Services in Sequoia Photos

Well, that's weird. Many of us have several Libraries, and Location Lookup works in them all. It sounds like you've done some good troubleshooting. To narrow things down, try these steps:

• Restart the computer (of course)
• Re-start in Safe Mode. This bypasses certain potentially disruptive processes, and it often helps. Safe Mode is different for different computers, so see this: 

           Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support 

Those are the easiest things to try first. Then try these:

• You did this one, but I'll list it anyway: Use another library if you have one, or make a small test Library with a few pictures in it and see if the same thing happens. You can create a new Library by closing Photos and then option-clicking on the Photos icon.
• Make a new user and see if the same problem recurs with it
• Rebuild your Photos Library--close Photos and re-launch by option-command-clicking the app icon.

The idea is to find out if the problem is with the Library, with your account, or with caches and login items, and stuff like that. One of these steps may fix the problem, but their failure to work also helps figure out what's happening.

Let us know what happens…

I am seeing this problem occasionally in any library, even for the system Photos Library. It can happen, when Photos cannot reach Apple's location server, for example, if the server is very slow to respond because of lots of traffic after a system upgrade. But also, if my own Wi-Fi is slow due to the ongoing maintenance work of Vodafone.

Just to be sure - you have enabled the access to the location services for Photos in the System "Settings > Privacy and Security > Location Services"? I found it disabled after the most recent update. You may also check, if any firewall or AV software could be interfering.

As a work-around: When I cannot edit the location in the Info panel, it sometimes helps to use menu "Image > Location" to reset the location to the original location and to copy and paste a different location. Does the "Image > Location" menu work for you?

dpwatson wrote: Are you suggesting that I rebuild the system library that is working correctly? Rebuilding the secondary library has no effect on the problem.

Any library that's not doing what you think it ought to do.

Where are the alternative libraries stored? If on an external, it needs to be formatted Mac OS X Extended, Journaled or apfs and directly connected to the Mac, not on a network share.

That blows that theory :)

As a test: create another library, add a few pics to it and see if the look up works in that one.

It sounds like you haven't yet repaired the Library, is that right? If you can, back it up first.