Photos does not download photos from iCloud

[ahostmadsen]

Basically, Photos is totally stalled downloading photos to my Mac. I need to outline the sequence of events
1. I enabled shared library with my wife
2. I realized it was then also downloading my wife's originals to my laptop, which there is no disk space for.
3. I disabled shared library (keeping only my own pictures). That worked online and on my i-devices, but the Mac was stuck downloading the pictures that there was no space for.
4. So, I disabled icloud photos on the Mac and deleted the library (emptying trash).
5. I created a new album, enabled icloud photos (download originals). After about a week it had downloaded 500 of 35,000 pictures.
6. Tried again: disable icloud photos, delete, new library. Now it's even worse: it's stuck halfway through 'restoring from icloud' for several days.

Any suggestions?

 

[capamac]

I stopped using photo cloud sync some years ago.

I just transfer photos manually when desired. No cloud.

I'm guessing Apple's just been ignoring this issue in the years since I stopped using it.

Apple's too busy with all their nonsense; they're just "adding more features" and "Liquid Glass!" and "Here's some more emoji" ... they don't have time for things like fixing bugs any more.

 

[Bigwaff]

After about a week it had downloaded 500 of 35,000 pictures.

If it's downloading full size originals, how many GB are your 35K photos? How fast is your internet connection? How often is your Mac sleeping. The iCloud photo sync process is a background process. It's designed to not consume your internet bandwidth. Plus, is disk filling up again? Just be patient.

 

[ignatius345]

Basically, Photos is totally stalled downloading photos to my Mac. I need to outline the sequence of events
1. I enabled shared library with my wife
2. I realized it was then also downloading my wife's originals to my laptop, which there is no disk space for.
3. I disabled shared library (keeping only my own pictures). That worked online and on my i-devices, but the Mac was stuck downloading the pictures that there was no space for.
4. So, I disabled icloud photos on the Mac and deleted the library (emptying trash).
5. I created a new album, enabled icloud photos (download originals). After about a week it had downloaded 500 of 35,000 pictures.
6. Tried again: disable icloud photos, delete, new library. Now it's even worse: it's stuck halfway through 'restoring from icloud' for several days.

Any suggestions?

Step 6 can take ages. IIRC the last time I got stuck in that same step, a restart eventually got things moving. But regardless, I’ve got a big library (over 55,000 photos and 7,000 videos) and the restore did take quite a few days ultimately.

On the whole I find iCloud Photos very much worthwhile. I’ve got access to all those photos and videos and they sync quite well between two Macs and an iPhone. I know there are ways to replicate that with a NAS, but I’m just not up for the maintenance, personally.

BTW, if you want to “fact check” what’s uploaded to iCloud, the iCloud.com website is a good place to look.

 

[ahostmadsen]

Step 6 can take ages. IIRC the last time I got stuck in that same step, a restart eventually got things moving. But regardless, I’ve got a big library (over 55,000 photos and 7,000 videos) and the restore did take quite a few days ultimately.

On the whole I find iCloud Photos very much worthwhile. I’ve got access to all those photos and videos and they sync quite well between two Macs and an iPhone. I know there are ways to replicate that with a NAS, but I’m just not up for the maintenance, personally.

BTW, if you want to “fact check” what’s uploaded to iCloud, the iCloud.com website is a good place to check.

Yes, now it's finally on track again. It finished "restoring from icloud" and has started downloading originals. The library is 13Gb out of 311Gb (I know the size from my other computer). But with this speed it could take a year to download the pictures! I don't understand why it's so slow. When I have done this in the past, it has taken a few days to download pictures (with somewhat high CPU). It as though now they have decided it should only download when absolutely nothing else is happening on the computer.

 

[kagharaht]

I take it that it's happening even if your Mac is set to never sleep?

 

[capamac]

Can store data on local drives for faster speed. The cloud is just someone else's hard drive after all.

 

[ahostmadsen]

OK, now it's suddenly going fast! I can see the count decreasing in real time. I still think my first attempt stalled, and deleting the library and restarting was what has made it work now.

 

[benholt]

Glad it kicked into gear. The "rebuild then stall" pattern is super common — toggling iCloud Photos off and on rebuilds the local Photos index, but cloudd's reconciliation queue can sit for ages before it actually starts pulling originals, and the progress UI in Photos just shows the static count. For anyone hitting this in the future, watch Activity Monitor for cloudd CPU/network — if it's flat at zero for more than 20 minutes after a library rebuild it's stuck. A `killall cloudd` in Terminal forces it to respawn and usually has the count moving within a minute. The Shared Library wrinkle is worth flagging too: just unsubscribing isn't enough, you have to leave the Shared Library entirely from the device-level settings before the originals stop trying to pull down.

 

[ahostmadsen]

Glad it kicked into gear. The "rebuild then stall" pattern is super common — toggling iCloud Photos off and on rebuilds the local Photos index, but cloudd's reconciliation queue can sit for ages before it actually starts pulling originals, and the progress UI in Photos just shows the static count. For anyone hitting this in the future, watch Activity Monitor for cloudd CPU/network — if it's flat at zero for more than 20 minutes after a library rebuild it's stuck. A `killall cloudd` in Terminal forces it to respawn and usually has the count moving within a minute. The Shared Library wrinkle is worth flagging too: just unsubscribing isn't enough, you have to leave the Shared Library entirely from the device-level settings before the originals stop trying to pull down.

It finished downloading (250Gb). I think the first attempt did indeed get stuck. Deleting the photo library and starting over did the trick. Once it actually got to downloading on the second attempt it was fast.