macOS Photos NOT Syncing with iCloud

It has been a few days since I turned on Shared Album syncing:

It has been nearly four days since my last post (when I turned on Shared Album syncing) and I want to update this thread.

In addition to turning on Shared Album synching, I’ve added few Photos so that I now have 43,865 Photos (and still have 167 Videos) in my new Photos Library:

And now, not surprisingly, my new Library is larger than the old one:

Finder:

• 237.49GB (Nello.photoslibrary, Old)
• 265.35GB (Nello2023.photoslibrary, New)

(No, I do NOT understand why the date for the old Library keeps increasing. Could this possibly be due to Time Machine “touching” files and thereby changing the date when it runs a backup?)

Get Info:

• 265,353,985,351 bytes (266.02 GB on disk)(Nello.photoslibrary, Old)
• 237,473,913,211 bytes (238.26 GB on disk) (Nello2023.photoslibrary, New)

So, at first blush, my new Library is a superset of my old one … hurray!

I suppose that I could do a detailed comparison of the two Libraries with something like PowerPhotos by Fat Cat Software. Is there a better way?

Does anyone have any other ideas for reconciling the content of the two Libraries?

In particular, does anyone know of a way to find differences in organization (including: (a) new Albums, (b) changed Album names, or (c) photos moved to or added to different Albums) or metadata (including: (a) Locations, (b) People/Faces, (c) Captions, or (d) Titles) between two Libraries?

Thank you for reading.

The “download” completed before 9:00 this morning, a bit under 36 hours after the new .photoslibrary was created and started syncing on February 9.

macOS Photos

iCloud Photos

But, the old .photoslibrary is larger than the new one.

Finder:

• 237.49GB (Nello.photoslibrary, Old)
• 207.05GB (Nello2023.photoslibrary, New)

Get Info:

• 237,488,174,473 bytes (238.27 GB on disk) (Nello.photoslibrary, Old)
• 218,226,537,807 bytes (218.76 GB on disk) (Nello2023.photoslibrary, New)

But, recall that on February 9 Apple Support told me to NOT to sync Shared Albums until later.

I’m hoping that the two libraries will be more similar after I turn Shared Album syncing back on, which I’m doing now.

It has been over a week and there’s been NO progress.

Here’s what Photos said last night before contacting Apple Support:

That’s right. A week ago it was “Uploading 66 Items” and now it’s “Uploading 43,903.”

I presume that’s because I logged out/in of my Apple ID, hoping that things would reset. But it didn’t help.

Yesterday evening I called Apple Support and was referred to level 2.

We tried a lot of basic things like this sequence: (1) pausing the sync, (2) quitting photos, (3) restarting the iMac, (4) launching Photos. It took a long time “loading” and then took a long time to load all the album thumbnails. But, in the end it didn’t change the sync status.

Next we played with  → System Preference → Network. (By the way, Speedtest says that my WiFi is down/up 25.8/5.43 and my Ethernet is 41.6/5.53.) There was some concern with having both a wired and WiFi connection simultaneously. They we played around with turning one or the other off and promoting the remaining Service to the top position.

Eventually, it miraculously started syncing—or rather “Uploading”— at about 8pm last evening; I put that in quotes because all the images and videos were already on iCloud Photos, having been uploaded from my iPhone with lightning speed. The iMac syncing involved almost exclusively rearranging images and videos into new Smart and regular albums and renaming existing albums.

I wish that I could tell you what broke the logjam but I can not.

Right now, here’s the status after “Uploading” for a total of about 16 hours:

Yes, in 16 hours the upload count reduced from 43,903 to 18,836 or ((43,903-18,836)/16 =) 1,567/hr.; still incredibly slow but moving. At this rate, it will take another (18,836/1,567 =) 12 hours to complete?!?

By the way, sync used to work fine on my iMac until upgrading to macOS Monterey in October 2021. It has been a dog ever since. No, my iMac is a Retina 5K 27-inch Late 2015, too old to upgrade to macOS Ventura.

So, the good news is that it is making slow progress. The bad news is that it is still very painful and not really fixed (as far as I’m concerned).

Thanks for asking.

@Richard.Taylor said: “It could easily take weeks for 40K pictures to synchronize. It's not just sending files, of course. It's checking each picture with all the others to see if it's already been transferred, and it's checking for pictures going the other way, too. So I'm guessing that transfer time goes more like the square of the number of pictures. Hence, the first syncing takes a really long time.”

I sure hope that this is not an exponential process. I would imagine that it’s hashing each photo and comparing the hashes prior to up- or downloading any file. Moreover, I’d also imagine that these lists of hashes on both the iMac and iCloud are indexed and binary searches are used to find matches. In the end, I’d expect the sync process to be the classic n log(n) order of complexity.

It's been over 6 hours and the "Uploading 18,836" hasn't budged.

So I called Apple Support again.

This time the support person walked me through creating a new .photoslibrary and I'm in the process of syncing this new library with iCloud. Unfortunately this probably means abandoning some meta data that was in the old library, which hadn't synced to iCloud yet. This meta data includes: new and renamed regular and Smart Albums as well as markups to images and videos for People and Locations. I'm sorry to leave it behind but I'll eventually redo the lost metadata.

So far, about half of the Photos and all of the Videos have been "updated" meaning that placeholders appear in the Photos application, but the data is still in the cloud. My old library is almost 240GB and the new one just crossed 700MB. So there's still a LOT of data to download. But at least my iMac and iCloud are talking.

I'll post an update tomorrow morning.

@léonie

Thank you for your encouragement.

As I mentioned, my original Photos Library was nearly 240GB. This morning the new one is less than 6GB.

The good news is that "Uploading" has changed to "Downloading" but it is going to take days—weeks?—to download all the photos and videos. (And at the suggestion of Apple Support, I did NOT enable syncing Shared Albums yet; he said let the regular content finish before starting the Shared content.)

I'll keep posting my progress.

Thanks again.

(My new macOS Photos Library) is AGAIN stuck syncing with iCloud Photos:

macOS Photos

iCloud Photos

iOS Photos

Update:

PowerPhotos by Fat Cat Software does NOT support comparisons between Libraries.

Giving this a bump.

Someone suggested to me that there may be a permissions problem that prevents files from syncing … any thoughts?