Steve Zodiac

Q: Photos for Mac behaving VERY oddly since upgrade to Sierra

Hi all.

I upgraded my mid-2010 MacBook Pro to macOS Sierra on 21st September.

 

The first time I launched the Photos app after the upgrade I got the usual message about the Photos library being updated, but when that reached 100% I noticed that a lot of thumbnails in my library were missing. The photos in question were showing in the thumbnail view (or 'moments') as pale grey rectangles with a cloud icon inside them.

 

I didn’t panic immediately, because I assumed that they would gradually re-populate over a little while. I had Photos preferences set to ‘Optimize Mac storage’, so all my originals should be on iCloud; I have a Time Capsule making automatic back-ups, and I did a Time Machine backup on that immediately before the upgrade, so I'm reasonably confident that I’ve not actually lost my photos, (and all my photos and their thumbnails are present & correct on my iPhone).

 

But, nearly a fortnight after the upgrade, most of my thumbnails are still missing from the Mac Photos app, which makes it very difficult to locate pictures of course.

 

Last night I noticed that the Photos app was showing ‘Uploading nnnnnn of 10,985 photos’ at the foot of the moments view, with the first figure slowly reducing, so I disabled the power saving options to make sure my Mac didn’t go to sleep and I let it run until the uploading was complete. It then showed ‘updating…’ at the foot of the moments view for a while.

 

I was hopeful that my thumbnails would be back after that, but they're not!

 

It seems that the Photos app isn't syncing with my iCloud storage for some reason, or at least if it is it isn't actually displaying what it has synced.

 

Double-clicking on these blank thumbnails to open the photo is not consistent either. On some that I try to open, they do open, and when I return to the thumbnail view the thumbnail is now there too. But on others that I try to open I just see a completely white area where the photo should be. However (and this is really weird!) when I return to the thumbnail view after those I very very briefly see the photos as they shrink down to thumbnail size, and then they are blank thumbnails with clouds in again...

 

I'm wondering whether I should change the the Photos preference from ‘optimize storage’ to ‘download originals’ in an effort to get my thumbnails back. It seems I have nearly 62GB of space free on my Mac, and my photos library shows as taking 31GB currently. Or should I re-install the Photos app? (Is that possible?)

 

Or is there a better solution to this problem please?

 

Thanks in advance for any helpful advice.

 

Message was edited by: Steve Zodiac: Correction of grammar.

Posted on Oct 2, 2016 9:20 AM

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Q: Photos for Mac behaving VERY oddly since upgrade to Sierra

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  • Helpful answers

  • by LarryHN,Apple recommended

    LarryHN LarryHN Oct 3, 2016 1:43 AM in response to Steve Zodiac
    Level 10 (85,108 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Oct 3, 2016 1:43 AM in response to Steve Zodiac

    try rotating one thumbi=nail and reotating back - if this fixes it you can do that for groups of up to about 1000 photos at a time to fix them quickly - How to Rebuild Thumbnails in a Photos Library

     

    LN

  • by Steve Zodiac,

    Steve Zodiac Steve Zodiac Oct 3, 2016 1:43 AM in response to LarryHN
    Level 1 (21 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 3, 2016 1:43 AM in response to LarryHN

    Thanks Larry.

     

    I tried the technique outlined in your link, and it does seem to work... to a degree.

     

    When I select a blank thumbnail and press ⌘R, the first thing that happens is a small window appears telling me that it is downloading the image, which takes a little while, and then as soon as the image appears as a thumbnail it rotates. I rotate it further to restore the correct orientation and, yes, the thumbnail that wasn't there before now is there.

     

    But the downloading even for one image is quite a few seconds, and when I do a batch of fifty it takes about five minutes or so. So a batch of 1000 would take at least 100 minutes just to download, and I have nearly 11,000 to do. I think this works out at about eighteen and a half hours in total, which is a bit impractical.

     

    I'm fairly sure that my Photos library was somehow corrupted during the upgrade to Sierra, so my next thought of a practical solution is to try to restore the Photos library from a pre-Sierra Time Machine back-up. Is that likely to work, or are there any obvious snags to it?

  • by LarryHN,Helpful

    LarryHN LarryHN Oct 3, 2016 7:50 AM in response to Steve Zodiac
    Level 10 (85,108 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Oct 3, 2016 7:50 AM in response to Steve Zodiac

    One snag is that doing a restore (or a library repair) will trigger a new upload to ICPL which takes a long time too

     

    If you can stand losing faces(people) and projects you can create a new system library and let ICPL download everything automatically

     

    LN

  • by Steve Zodiac,

    Steve Zodiac Steve Zodiac Oct 3, 2016 7:56 AM in response to LarryHN
    Level 1 (21 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 3, 2016 7:56 AM in response to LarryHN

    Thanks.

     

    I decided to do the Time Machine restore before you posted that, and it did take a while, (a couple of hours), to upload and then add, but it was still a lot quicker than the rotation option and it did it unattended. And I have got all my thumbnail views back again. Phew!

     

    I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place, though.

     

    When I look at People (faces), it tells me that it is scanning, and will continue when plugged in and the Photos app is closed. But to be honest I can live without People anyway. (That sounds ever so wrong, but you know what I mean...)

  • by LarryHN,

    LarryHN LarryHN Oct 3, 2016 8:53 AM in response to Steve Zodiac
    Level 10 (85,108 points)
    Photos for Mac
    Oct 3, 2016 8:53 AM in response to Steve Zodiac

    You can ignore and not use people but you can not stop the scan - it is scanning faces and objects and the results are used bfor searching and for memories and will go on until it completes sooner or later

     

    LN

  • by Steve Zodiac,

    Steve Zodiac Steve Zodiac Oct 4, 2016 3:59 AM in response to LarryHN
    Level 1 (21 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 4, 2016 3:59 AM in response to LarryHN

    Yes, I'd be happy with that, except that it doesn't seem to be working quite as it should...

     

    Despite it telling me that it will continue scanning 'when the computer is plugged in and the app is not in use', the number still needing to be scanned doesn't seem to have reduced at all in eighteen hours or so. And I have deliberately left the computer plugged in and awake for the process to continue. It still doesn't really bother me though.

     

    And, although I now have all my thumbnails back in the moments view, which is what I was wanting, I now notice that the Photos app does not seem to be downloading the original full-resolution files when I expand the thumbnails into pictures. The little white circle only gets to three o'clock, (25%), and then stops. No matter how long I leave the picture open, the white circle doesn't budge, and so I don't have access to the full resolution versions of my pictures now.

     

    I know that the full-resolution versions are safe in iCloud, because the Photos app on my iPhone does download them as it should, the white circle on that going all the way around, but it doesn't do so on my Mac.

     

    Anyone have any ideas how to 'kick-start' the little white circles please? Could the two above issues be related at all?

     

    I have my restored library set as the system library, and iCloud is turned on in Photos with the 'optimize storage on my Mac' option selected.