Photos ‘library updating’ 4% in 12 hours

[telejm]

Hi everyone,

I updated to Catalina on my 2017 Mac on Monday and since then, I’ve made several attempts to open my photos app only for it to be stuck with the ‘library updating’ screen. I decided to leave it overnight (it was at 4% when I left it before going to bed at 9:30) and upon getting up at 9 this morning, I logged in to find it stuck at 4% still. I’ve tried to get it to update several tiles since Monday with no success. I’m a photographer and while I have most of the images backed up on external hard drives, it’s not much of a consolation because I do all of my workflow and edits through that Mac.

If anyone has any advice about a fix for this, I’d greatly appreciate it.

 

[ferrarr]

Have you restarted the Mac? Try that, then give Photos another try? What OS did you upgrade from?

 

[telejm]

I think it was High Sierra that I upgraded from but I’m not 100% sure. I’ve tried shutting down and turning back on again a couple of times. I’ll try a restart.

 

[ferrarr]

See if anything here helps, Get help with the Photos app on your Mac - Apple Support

Edit: I forgot to ask, if you left Photos closed at all? Just quit it, and forget it for a day or so?

 

[MacInWin]

Bob's suggestion is the solution. The sync of Photos to iCloud is very slow because it runs with very low priority deep in the background. I recently had 9000 images take three weeks to finish sync. I never found a way to accelerate the process. I finally just left Photos running overnight every night and waited it out.

As a lesson to be learned from this, when you do the next upgrade, restore the Mac Photos from the backup, not from iCloud. That way you at least have all of the photos to work with and if the sync takes weeks, it doesn't hurt so much.

Also, set the Energy Saver settings in System Preferences to keep the Mac awake. I let the display turn off after a few minutes, but have the "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" checked and "Enable Power Nap..." OFF. Also don't let the hard drives sleep. Once the sync is done, you can restore whatever you want for Energy Savings.