My Imac is showing uploading photos to Icloud. However it has not progressed for 3 days. There is over 20000 photos recovered from an old hard drive that i want to put in the Icloud to keep safe.
At this rate it is going to take years!
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
The progress bar is not continually updated.
But you should be seeing some progress by checking directly on your iCloud webpage in the browser. Open Safari and go to the web page www.icloud.com, sign I with your iCloud AppleID and open the Photos.app on that web page. Does the number of items in iCloud change, when you are looking directly at the webpage?
If the number shown in iCloud does not change at all, ensure that the cloud processes are running on your Mac.
It helps to restart the Mac and Photos occasionally to kick off the background processes.
And you may check, if you are items in your Photos Library, that are not compatible with iCloud. Is the status bar in Photos showing any items "On this Mac Only"? Is the smart album with the rule "Photo is unable to upload to iCloud Photo" empty? See: About the status bar in Photos for macOS - Apple Support
Some of the photos you recovered from an old hard drive may be corrupted or cannot be processed. Or you may have included videos and photos in an incompatible format. Which system version is running on your iMac?
The progress bar is not continually updated.
But you should be seeing some progress by checking directly on your iCloud webpage in the browser. Open Safari and go to the web page www.icloud.com, sign I with your iCloud AppleID and open the Photos.app on that web page. Does the number of items in iCloud change, when you are looking directly at the webpage?
If the number shown in iCloud does not change at all, ensure that the cloud processes are running on your Mac.
It helps to restart the Mac and Photos occasionally to kick off the background processes.
And you may check, if you are items in your Photos Library, that are not compatible with iCloud. Is the status bar in Photos showing any items "On this Mac Only"? Is the smart album with the rule "Photo is unable to upload to iCloud Photo" empty? See: About the status bar in Photos for macOS - Apple Support
Some of the photos you recovered from an old hard drive may be corrupted or cannot be processed. Or you may have included videos and photos in an incompatible format. Which system version is running on your iMac?
Hi
It will take a few days. Bear in mind it is not only uploading, it is also sorting and comparing.
For refernce, my 5000 photo 50GB library took a full 48 hours - so you could be looking at over a week 24/7, assuming the speed is similar.
Leave the mac on full time, with the photos app open, and connected to power.
In addition to Tony’s excellent advice it also completely depends on the upload bandwidth you have from your internet provider. My son has AT&T fiber with a 500mb/s upload speed and it only takes a few minutes to upload several thousand songs.
Hi Ikrupp
Syncing iCloud photos libraries does not seem to be limited by your own connection bandwidth. It generally goes much slower than that.
For example, with my 17Mb/s upload speed, you'd expect it would only take 7 or 8 hours for a 50GB library if it was purely my connnection speed being the bottleneck. In reality with iCloud sync, that took 48 hours, some 6 times longer.
Uploading photos to Icloud from Imac
