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
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
Posted on Oct 3, 2016 1:43 AM