Photos for Mac, stuck on "updating" trying to upload to iCloud Photos Library

Did you find the answer to why your photos are hung up in the "updating" mode? I'm wondering, when they are all updated, which device do we use to "clean up" the scrambled albums etc. What a mess.

No...I am still seeing the same problem. What's strange is that when I make additions to my pic inventory by either adding a single pic to Photos from iMessages (from a Man or iDevice) or by Importing 15-25 pics on my Mac, everything seems to update and propagate correctly across my two Macs and two iDevices and the "Updating ..." message on the Macs goes away. But then it reappears.

I am still experiencing this problem. I even called applecare and actually had to ask if I was really speaking to someone at apple. They were so unhelpful it was ridiculous. She was reading from a sheet or something. I said I can do that. Im contacting you in hopes that you being Apple you would be aware of this issue and help me and provide info on why this is happening. Of course they claim they have never heard of this issue.

My big problem is I am unable to switch my phone over to my wifi at home. When i do it kicks icloud photo upload on, goes absolutely nowhere but swallows up all the bandwidth in the house so I am unable to go on the web.

@ttrq01 - What helped me (I think..) was I turned off all iCloud sharing, syncing, Photo Stream, on every device. 3 imacs, 2 ipads, 1 MB Pro and my cell. I restarted every one on them. I then got on my main iMac and made a new album named *Scotland. I put the asterisk in front so I would know that it was an album that was made from my main iMac (I needed to see if and where it synced to later.) I put a few photos from that trip in there from the All Photos tab.

Then I turned on the iCloud upload on. I checked "optimize photos" and Photo Stream (3 checks.) At that time I still had 2,866 photos to upload.

On my cell, I made an album with 2 asterisks **Hawaii. I put some photos in there. Then I turned on iCloud upload, optomize and Photo Stream. I left for 2 hours and came back and now I have only 77 left to upload. Both of the asterisk albums synced over with their new pics in tact. That's important because all my intact iPhoto albums photos got scrambled with it "transitioned" to Photos. At least I know that the albums with the asterisks are cleaned up with the correct pics in them.

I'll let you know when the uploading is complete. We'll see if "uploading" comes back on. Here's my thing, once I get all this sorted... I don't need 5000+ photos on every device. AND I don't need every photo from my phone in an album. I may turn off the syncing all together and just airdrop selected photos from one device to another. You watch, I'll get this all figured out, and Apple will have another upgrade and scramble it all up again.. LOL!

I will say, now that most of my photos are all in one place, the new Photo app MIGHT be ok.. The jury is still out on that.

@fpalestini - Back up your photos on Time Machine or an external drive (or both.) Try turning iCloud upload off on every device. Restart all your devices. Reboot your router. Turn on the iCloud upload on. Check "optimize photos" and Photo Stream (3 checks.) Sounds like you have a log-jam. Perhaps long videos? If you still have a problem, see if you can store your videos somewhere (I don't know if Dropbox or and external drive would work.. You might google that.) That may help get your photos uploaded, then upload the movies later. (Yes, it's a bit maddening to have to talk to a "genius" that might be still in training.) I had an EXCELLENT fella the other day.. Not related to this matter (Purchases made under an old account BEFORE we had to use "@me". Good luck!

Guess what - UPDATE COMPLETED. We'll see if it stays that way..

EDIT: MAKE SURE YOUR DEVICES ARE SET TO NEVER FALL ASLEEP.

OK, I just checked my update status on my iMac. It said "updated 3 minutes ago." I THINK it's fixed... we'll see.

OK, I just checked my update status on my iMac. It said "updated 3 minutes ago." I just finished setting up my " * " albums in Photo on iMac and cleaned up the scrambled pics.

I just checked my iphone, and it does not have the same albums (*) and the pics are still scrambled. I think I might delete all the photos on the phone, THEN sync...?

I'll be back.

Apple, next time please make these "upgrades" a smoother transition..."

Had the exact same issue just now. Solution:

Quit Photos app

Open Activity Monitor (in Utilities Folder, just use Spotlight to find it)

Search for "Photos"

Select "Photos Agent" process, click the quit button at the upper left (looks like stop sign with an x in it)

When pop up window opens, select "Force Quit"

Launch Photos app

You should see the stuck photos start downloading again.

Sorry - no luck with me on the force quits, the reboots, etc. I have been trying for three days now with no luck.

Current solution looks like exporting all my photos, uploading them into Picasa for free.

IMHO Apple's iphoto/photo software for macs has been an utter dog's breakfast for a while now (since 2011). iMovie is such a memory hog it has never worked on my laptop. I used to be a photo editor for a student newspaper (Quark and Photoshop on Win'95), and the clunkiness of this software is awful.

Having been a mac user since the LCII, i am very annoyed about the utter trash that this sofware is. If it wasn't embedded into iOS I would be long gone....

I had a similar problem whereby a few days worth of photos I had taken on my iPhone weren't syncing with my Macbook despite syncing OK with my iPad. The Photos app on my Macbook knew the photos were there as it had put up a blank frame for each one, and right-clicking on the blank frame gave all the exif info, so it was just the picture data itself that it wasn't downloading.

Inspired by your answer, I fired up the activity monitor and found two processes under the CPU tab that were still running, despite having shut down the Photo app. One was 'Photos' and the other 'Photos Agent'. So I killed those and under the Memory tab found a process called 'photolibraryd' so I killed that as well. Then I fired up the Photos app again and after a few seconds, lo and behold, the 22 or so missing photos synced from my iPhone OK. Looking on the Activity monitor again all three of the processes previously killed were back up and running under both the CPU and the Memory tabs. So it seems it was a simple matter of one of the processes getting corrupted and not shutting down properly I guess. Bit of a head scratcher for a while though!

I had this problem for about a week - "updating" but nothing happening. I'd tried practically everything I've found on this board which didn't involve recreating the entire Photos library. In the end I ran everything on Diskwarrior 5 on my boot drive (defragged, repaired files and folders etc) and now Photos is working fine straight away :-)

I got it working! I was having the same problem. All my iPhone photos for 3 years (10,000+ images) were on my MacBook (via Image Capture) but not uploading to iCloud after importing them into the Photos App. It was stuck "updating." So, this is what I did:

1. Installed MacBook El Capitan 10.11.2 update + restarted computer.
2. Deactivated iCloud on ALL DEVICES—MacBook Pro, iPhone & iPad.
3. Activated iCloud on ONLY my MacBook (where all my photos needed to be uploaded from).
4. Opened the Photos App. And they started uploading!
5. After they finished uploading, reactivate iCloud on my iPhone & iPad.

Hope this helps!

This worked for me. It takes a few minutes. Thanks, great post!

I recently experienced the same frustration in Photo with "Updating..." at the bottom center of the app. My photos weren't uploading for a few weeks. I have an iMac running OS X El Capitan.

I initially attempted to log out of iCloud in System Preferences, but then I got the spinning color wheel of death, which led to Force Quit it. I restarted my computer, and I was promoted to log back into iCloud. Bingo. I guess I was logged out at some point. I recall receiving a notification on my iPhone to log back in iCloud the other day, but I put it off. I'm curious if the two were related. Whatever the case, restarting my iMac did the trick.

FINALLY SUCCESS!

After reading through pages of potential fixes on this STUPID issue that shouldn't even exist I have a solution. I've had this issue for months, going all the way back to Mavericks. Tried everything, clearing the library, which actually doesn't clear the library. Deleted it, re-created it, photos stuck in iCloud that weren't deletable that kept downloading into the bundle. iCloud Photos is a pile of .

Running these commands in Terminal allowed iCloud to download the images that were stuck as placeholder images.

rm ~/Library/Caches/CloudKit/CloudKitMetadata*

pkill -9 com.apple.ICPPhotoStreamLibraryService

pkill -9 cloudphotosd

So, to never have to do this fix again I made a simple Automator script to always execute these commands then open the Photos app. Here's what I made, then copied the icon from the Photos App to the Script Application.

Steps:

1. Open Automator, create a new "Application" save in iCloud so you can use on your desktop and laptop if needed.
2. Add "Quit Application" and choose Photos app to close first before running the commands.
3. Add "Run Shell Script" and paste in those above commands.
4. Add "Launch Application" and choose Photos app.
5. Save
6. File -> Export and save to your Applications Folder as "Photos Launch."
7. In Applications folder right click Photos app click "Get Info" then left click on it's icon top left corner, press CMD+C.
8. Right click on the "Photos Launch" application you made in Application folder, click "Get Info" left click on it's top left icon, press CMD+V.
9. Delete Photos app from your Dock, drag Photos Launch app to your Dock.
10. Enjoy, no more stupid sync issues, hopefully.

My iPhoto gets "stuck" as well. The re-boot did the trick for me. I had exhausted all of the other suggestions and decided to do a reboot, and once I opened iPhoto, my pictures all uploaded perfectly!