Photos from my iPhone aren't showing up in Photos app on Mac

Hi, I just thought I'd chime my two sense in! I have had this same problem—so annoying! Most of the time I can do what one of the others said, and open photos on my phone, then swipe up to do the update motion, then return to open photos on my mac, and it will start syncing, (slowly but surely). However, this doesn't always work. I'm impatient so found another route: select which new photos you want to sync to your mac on your phone by going to the selected group (such as those you may have taken today), and click share. Check the boxes of which ones you want to share. Then share it to your icloud photo sharing library. It will show up on your mac under Shared photos (at the top of photos where it says Album, Shared, etc.)

Hope that helps!

That's a poor solution. Photos added to shared albums are shared at a reduced resolution.

I had to turn off all of my "energy saving" preferences on my mac. It uploaded all my photos (29,000) in about a day. Before I turned those off, it had been "uploading" for about a week with very little progress because the computer was "sleeping" every few minutes, and I'm assuming that while it was sleeping it wasn't uploading anything. Still waiting to see if the photos I've taken on my phone will show up in photos once Photos on the Mac is done uploading to iCloud. It's a very slow process, for sure, but at least it's getting faster.

this was super helpful! as soon as i open and closed the app it started working!! thank you so much

I had this issue too and just found a way to fix it. Sorry if this is old news. I'm running OSX Yosemite 10.10.5 and my Photos app worked fine until recently, when it just showed placeholders for the IOS pix I was taking, but not showing the actual images. Logging in to iCloud and clicking the Photos tab showed all of the photos, so they're floating around somewhere, just not in the Photos app.

From the Photos app, I went to Preferences, then:

Under the "iCloud" tab, I saw the message "Downloading XXX Items" (showing no progress on the bar) and next to it a button that says "Pause for one day". I selected that pause button two times (to pause and resume), and the downloading immediately resumed, revealing the images in the Photos app.

Hope this may help someone else having this issue.

Cheers!