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

Anyone get this message when they open their Photo Library from the Finder? I am fine opening the library through the Photos app. I have tried rebuilding but this message (and the uploading problem persists). I have also tried creating a whole new library (migrating from iPhoto) which produces exactly the same problem. Might be another clue that helps us track down what is causing this problem.

UUnfortunately I am still stuck 😟.

Was on the phone with Apple yesterday they did stuff and thought they'd fixed it. But no. The thing gets stuck in exactly the same place every time. I have even tried now deleting the photo it seem not to like and it's still stuck. Tried to reinstall the os even. Still nothing.

I have a call this afternoon with Apple. Reckon if they can't fix it then I shall conclude that it just doesn't work and save my money by downgrading iCloud and forgetting this photo library. I guess the real problem is that none of us can actually see behind the system to understand what is making it fall over.

shame because it was s good idea.

I thing you are right about the referenced files. I moved from Aperture, and have my library on an internal drive and some referenced files on an external.

But now I have another problem. Yesterday everything was uploading fine after deleting the CloudKit-files. It started uploading all my photos from scratch, but that was better than getting stuck on "updating". It had uploaded about 15000 photos when I went to bed, leaving about 10000. But when I got up in the morning iCloud photo library had turned itself of. And when I turned it on again it startet from scratch with 25000 photos to upload. I would have thought it at least had startet from where it left of, not from scratch. Can it have something to do with removing the CloudKit files from the library? That it contains some sort of log file that keeps track on where I am in the upload prosess?

As a follow up I have just finished with Apple support, who have not managed yet to pinpoint the problem! The chap suggested moving all the photos via iTunes to my iPad. Unfortunately when you turn iCloud Photo Library back on on the iPad anything put there from iTunes is deleted!

So back to square one. Time to give up on this, although Apple said they were keen to help me resolve this and keep the call going until we have fixed it!

Not sure the 'convenience' is worth the hassle!

I installed OS10.10.3 on my iMac and started moving my 27,000 photos from Photo to iCloud. I let the program run all might and by the next day I have moved 10,007 photos to iCloud. It appeared to me, however, that nothing was working and no additional photos were being added. I restarted the computer and the Photos program and attempted to download 88 pictures from my camera. Photos started up okay, I saw the 88 thumbnails, but the program would not download any of the pictures. I then attempted to quite Photos, but received a small box on my desktop that said something to the effect, "Closing your library ..." I waited several hours, but the notice did not disappear. When I attempted to force quit Photos I was warned that to force quit at that time might lose any changes. I waited several more hours, nothing changed. I force quite Photos and restarted the computer.

I then restarted Photos and it was exactly as I had it before (by that I mean that nothing was lost). I did find that I had an additional 50 of so additional photos uploaded to iCloud. I then started Safari and logged into iCloud. With both Photos and iCloud open, (and iCloud open to photos) I then scrolled down to the bottom of the Pictures section on iCloud. At the bottom of that screen is a counter of the number of photos you have uploaded to iCloud. Every 10-20 seconds the spinning timer icon appeared and my iCloud photo count would be updated! I was adding approximately 12 photos per minute (or around 700 per hour). You only get the spinning icon for about 5 minutes, after that no more updates. If you mouse click the refresh button on Safari it reloads the page and starts the counter 5 minute cycle again. I have let both programs run for about 6 hours now and it has uploaded an additional 4,200 pictures. Only 18 hours to go to upload the other 13,000 photos :-( (I'm not complaining - at least I'm making progress).

I did notice the following while Photos and iCloud are running. (1) Some other programs would load very, very slowly. It took Messages around 2 minutes to show up on the screen and another minute to show me one new message. (2) The mail program will load, start to download new mail, then stop downloading mail (it appears to stop doing everything). You have to quit Mail, and then Force Quit mail, to totally quit the Mail program.

I also noticed that the newly transferred photos to iCloud show up both on my MacBook Pro laptop and my iPhone. I also found that both my laptop and iPhone work fine, both loading programs and the ability to receive email!

I am not a very learned hardware person. My totally uneducated guess is that my iMac is using up almost all of it's computational power getting the photos ready to upload -- and then actually sending them to iCloud. I find it strange that that the upload is progressing so slowly. I have FIOS with 75 Mbps of both upload and download speed, yet as best as I can figure I'm getting about 1 Mbps upload speed. (Here's my admittedly shaky math: 700 photos / hour TIMES around 5 Mb/photo = 3,500 Mb per hour of uploaded photos. Divide that by 3600 seconds in an hour = 0.97 mbps which is the average upload speed for the hour)

My point is that to try opening ONLY Photos and Safari, and in Safari only log into iCloud so you can see if you are actually uploading pictures. As far as I could tell, that was the only way that I could actually see that I was making progress.

Measure your upload speed (although your math is good)

Speedof.me is the site to use, no java, flash or other stuff to impede the measurement, post the result (latency and upload) here

Also 5Mb (megabits) is far too low as an estimated picture size, 5MB (megabytes) is more realistic.

I have gone back to iPhoto until an update comes out. annoyingly its screwed up all my April photos meta data. Apple I am annoyed.

I have also gone back to iPhoto. I've been working with Apple and have tried a bunch of different things mentioned on this and other threads but no luck. In trying to upload photos and movies to the cloud I always get stuck around 10k (of a total of 18k). And then with Photos in the Cloud turned off, synching to iOS devices is glitchy. I am really disappointed as I really wanted this to work for me. I have long experience with Apple and I have to say that they've never been good with Cloud services (even before it was called the cloud (who remembers idisk?)). Does anyone have suggestions for putting photos in someone else's cloud? I'm tempted by Dropbox.

alhagar wrote:

I have also gone back to iPhoto. I've been working with Apple and have tried a bunch of different things mentioned on this and other threads but no luck. In trying to upload photos and movies to the cloud I always get stuck around 10k (of a total of 18k). And then with Photos in the Cloud turned off, synching to iOS devices is glitchy. I am really disappointed as I really wanted this to work for me. I have long experience with Apple and I have to say that they've never been good with Cloud services (even before it was called the cloud (who remembers idisk?)). Does anyone have suggestions for putting photos in someone else's cloud? I'm tempted by Dropbox.

alhagar, DO NOT TRY to use Dropbox for iPhoto. Before this Photos disaster with Apple started, I tried the Dropbox route and spent hours with it. I am not kidding when I tell you I may have spent 20 hours with Dropbox tech support and we were unable to get it uploaded. Unfortunately, it sounds like we are going through the same BS with Photos and iCloud now....

I had the same problem with photo getting stuck when uploading. Someone in this discussion started over and everything worked after that. I kind of did the same. I renamed the photo file so the app would not see it. I then selected my Aperture file and started importing them into photo. Once that was done, I had to select this new fie so it could be used in the cloud. Everything started uploading a lot quicker than it had done originally. I could see groups of 200 or more images being uploaded in a few hours. So I let it continue to run. After 4 days everything is up there now. There are some errors like, images dated 2097 and they are out of order. The only thing that I can see that is not populated corectly any more is the April 2015 photo stream. Although this directory is not populated correctly, the images that should be there do show up when looking at all photos in the moments viewer. I see all the same images on my iPad also. The thing that is slowing me down is the organization of the images in the file. The images are sorted by date and time down to the minute. It makes a difference in which day the image is filed due to the time. It appears that any image taken after 6pm goes into the next days file. So I have a lot of misplaced images that need to be moved. Or I can just sit back and see if it all smooths out in a few months. I am using a MackBook air 11 inch mid 2013.

IT is indeed a shame that this doesn't seem to work. I have tried all sorts. I have had 2 calls with Apple, with a third on Saturday. If they cant fix it then I will give it up as a bad job.

the photos app is quite good for basic photographers like me. I will just use it like I always used iPhoto.

I have not tried using the upload to iCloud process again, but I had a thought about what might be a part of the problem and would appreciated any feedback on my theory. I tried to cull out my videos from the photos file and copy them to an external drive. When I did this I watched the progress. Its a USB transfer so it will be a little slow, but it's obvious that larger videos take much longer to copy. I have a few in my file that are 15 minutes long. These copied over to the hard drive, but much more slowly than I had anticipated. At one point I thought that this transfer, like the upload to iCloud, was "stuck."

When Photos transferred data to the cloud, is it getting "stuck" really? Maybe the large video files are the culprit? Transfers would clearly be much slower over the internet than just a local USB copy, and there is no bandwidth issue. If I were able to exclude all video files is it possible that the transfer rate of my 4,500 photos would take place at an acceptable rate and wouldn't take down my network for a week?

Hello guys,

I know how to solve your issues with Photos, but pay attention "It will only works for photos, not for your videos".

To be sure that everything is fine, quit Photos, turn off Photo Library in iCloud Preferences on your Mac. Then, go to your Images folder and delete your Photo Library file, empty your trash. Restart Photos, it will ask you to create a new library, do so. Quit Photos, re-enable Photo Library in iCloud Preferences (if you already have content, let Photos download everything next time you launch it).

Now, to add new photos and to be sure that you won't get an endless uploading status on Photos app, simply go to iCloud.com, then photos, here you can upload all your photos and you should find them later on your Photos App. Try to send 200 or 500 photos at a time, depending of your internet speed, because sometimes iCloud disconnect. It's the safest way I know...

Retiredtaxman64 wrote:

I have not tried using the upload to iCloud process again, but I had a thought about what might be a part of the problem and would appreciated any feedback on my theory. I tried to cull out my videos from the photos file and copy them to an external drive. When I did this I watched the progress. Its a USB transfer so it will be a little slow, but it's obvious that larger videos take much longer to copy. I have a few in my file that are 15 minutes long. These copied over to the hard drive, but much more slowly than I had anticipated. At one point I thought that this transfer, like the upload to iCloud, was "stuck."

When Photos transferred data to the cloud, is it getting "stuck" really? Maybe the large video files are the culprit? Transfers would clearly be much slower over the internet than just a local USB copy, and there is no bandwidth issue. If I were able to exclude all video files is it possible that the transfer rate of my 4,500 photos would take place at an acceptable rate and wouldn't take down my network for a week?

Max, that is not the case with me. I have less than 10 videos (all 30 seconds or less) and 12,000 pictures. It has taken 10 days to upload half of them and that is because on the weekends and evenings I monitor my iMac's progress all the time. I leave it uploading when I leave for work and it shuts off or gets "stuck" after about 40-60 pics and stays idle until I come home. It is SHAMEFUL for Apple to put such a piece of crap out there without testing it more.

How do you go back to iPhoto anyway? To the original library I had so meticulously organized before this clusterf#ck?

Well, iPhoto still works. My photo library is intact there but as I understand it, from prior posts, Photos doesn't really create an entirely new file but uses "aliases" to link to the old iPhoto file. If I try to re-do this, and I'm considering it, I have a backup of my iPhoto library, I would rename the photos file so that the new program doesn't see it and then select the iPhoto library as the new library file and it should, I think, re do the process as if I had just started up. I may be wrong in the details but somewhere in this thread someone gave an excellent link to an explanation for this. Still, I'm not sure it would solve the problems since I don't know of anything I did wrong on the first pass so why should it be different?