Hi everyone,
I’m wondering if anyone has seen this before or has any ideas.
I’m running macOS 26.6 RC on a new MacBook Pro M5 Max. My Photos library is stored in iCloud Photos. But I also saw this problem on 26.5.x versions.
I recently recreated my System Photo Library from scratch after troubleshooting another Photos issue. I deleted the previous library, created a brand-new System Photo Library, enabled iCloud Photos, and allowed it to completely resynchronize from iCloud.
The sync completed successfully:
At this point everything in Photos appears to work correctly:
Initially it was completely blank.
Later, while photolibraryd was still busy rebuilding, the Activity page suddenly began populating normally. I could watch it gradually filling in with gray placeholder thumbnails that were slowly replaced with actual thumbnails as processing continued.
Several hours later, after everything appeared complete, I quit Photos normally.
Since then, every time I relaunch Photos, the Activity page is empty again and displays:
No Shared Photos or Videos
All hot says on the page is: "You can add photos and videos from other albums."
photolibraryd remains completely idle (0% CPU), so Photos doesn’t appear to be rebuilding anything anymore.
What’s especially odd is that my M4 MacBook Pro, signed into the same Apple ID, using the same iCloud Photos library, displays the Activity page normally.
So the difference appears to be local to the M5 rather than my iCloud Photos data.
Has anyone seen this Activity-page behavior before?
More importantly, has anyone found a way to reset or rebuild only the Activity view without recreating the entire Photos library again?
I have already tried creating an entirely new System Photo Library and letting it fully synchronize from iCloud, so I’m hoping there’s another avenue to investigate.
Thanks for any ideas!
I’m wondering if anyone has seen this before or has any ideas.
I’m running macOS 26.6 RC on a new MacBook Pro M5 Max. My Photos library is stored in iCloud Photos. But I also saw this problem on 26.5.x versions.
I recently recreated my System Photo Library from scratch after troubleshooting another Photos issue. I deleted the previous library, created a brand-new System Photo Library, enabled iCloud Photos, and allowed it to completely resynchronize from iCloud.
The sync completed successfully:
- ~59,761 photos
- ~1,930 videos
- ~204 combined Shared Albums / Shared with You albums
At this point everything in Photos appears to work correctly:
- Library ✓
- People & Pets ✓
- Search ✓
- Shared Albums ✓
- Shared Album thumbnails ✓
- Album contents ✓
- Photo/video counts match all my other devices ✓
Initially it was completely blank.
Later, while photolibraryd was still busy rebuilding, the Activity page suddenly began populating normally. I could watch it gradually filling in with gray placeholder thumbnails that were slowly replaced with actual thumbnails as processing continued.
Several hours later, after everything appeared complete, I quit Photos normally.
Since then, every time I relaunch Photos, the Activity page is empty again and displays:
No Shared Photos or Videos
All hot says on the page is: "You can add photos and videos from other albums."
photolibraryd remains completely idle (0% CPU), so Photos doesn’t appear to be rebuilding anything anymore.
What’s especially odd is that my M4 MacBook Pro, signed into the same Apple ID, using the same iCloud Photos library, displays the Activity page normally.
So the difference appears to be local to the M5 rather than my iCloud Photos data.
Has anyone seen this Activity-page behavior before?
More importantly, has anyone found a way to reset or rebuild only the Activity view without recreating the entire Photos library again?
I have already tried creating an entirely new System Photo Library and letting it fully synchronize from iCloud, so I’m hoping there’s another avenue to investigate.
Thanks for any ideas!