Sharing resolution to iMovie update problem

My question was: Why does the AppStore show a never ending spinning wheel when I try to update iMovie. I had an old 2012 version and couldn't update to the latest version. I had no problems updating anything else. Even Xcode loaded (took a while, but still loaded).

In any case, I found that there had been a lot of old questions about this over the years, with either no real solution or solutions that did not work for me. So since I found a solution that worked for me, I thought I'd share in case anyone else has the same problem.

Spotlight Search and AppStore both found only the 2012 version of iMovie. So when I searched for the application using Spotlight, I found only the old 2012 version. And so I tried to update it and AppStore said it was from 2012 and gave me a button that said "update" but it always choked. The spinning wheel kept spinning, there was no partial download, there was no helpful info about what's going on, just a spinning wheel.

WHAT WAS IT? Look in the Applications directory for old iMovie installs. There were 3 installs plus the 10.1.9 (-2018) ie the latest version!! It was just sitting there waiting for me to find it manually. The latest version works great, and I pinned it to my dock. I changed the name of the old iMove directories to OLD_imovie_x. Spotlight now finds the newest version but the AppStore is still confused (still sees only the old 2012 version). Oh well- the solutions not perfect but I've got the latest version now. 🙂

Hope this helps others.