Photos has been stuck on updating People and uploading items for well over a week.

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Level 1

19 points

Photos has been stuck on updating People and uploading items for well over a week.

I've recently upgraded to Catalina and have left Photos 5.0 running in the background while plugged into power for well over a week. The status at the bottom of the People view continues to say "People will finish updating when Photos is in the background." and the status at the bottom of Photos says "Uploading 25 items".

Has anyone encountered something like this, and if so what did you do to fix it?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Nov 23, 2020 4:54 AM

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Answer 1

markwmsn

Level 6

15,569 points

Nov 25, 2020 4:20 PM in response to Kat-in-TX

For the People scan, be patient. Depending on how many photos you have, how fast or slow your computer is, and whether you ever allow it to sleep, the People scan can easily take multiple weeks before the main People window stops saying that. For individual person folders, the scan may not end until it finds enough pictures for each person; if you tagged somebody with only two or three photos, the scan may never end.

The upload should finish unless Photos is having a problem with specific items. One thing to try is to create a Smart Album with the criterion ("Photo" "is" "Unable to upload to iCloud Photos"). If there are any items in there, you will need to investigate what problem Photos is having with them.

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Photos has been stuck on updating People and uploading items for well over a week.

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