Photos 'Places' does not show any photos

[goffredo]

Weird, I have about 50,000 photos with geotagged locations. Upon importing them into the Apple Photos app, the 'Places' library did a great job allowing me to view my photos by geographic location, super handy.

Yesterday, I had a need to find photos taken in a certain location, so I fired up Apple Photos, and while my photos still show up in the various other Photos libraries ("Recents", "People", etc) just fine, the map that shows up in the Places view doesn't show any photo clusters. It used to show pins in geographic location where my photos were taken, and as I zoomed in, photo clusters ... the normal and expected functionality.

I deleted my photos library, created a new one, imported some test photos. The same problem persists. I have confirmed that the individual photos do show their geo location, via a pin on the map, in the Get Info detail. Yet the Places view shows nothing at all.

The only change I've made to my system that might explain this is upgrading to Catalina. But I haven't found any other reports of this issue in my searches yet. Anyone have any ideas?

 

[goffredo]

After a little more searching, I see this exact Catalina upgrade issue reported, with no resolution, in November 2019. I have posted an updated thread in Apple Support Community here. I will update this thread if any resolution is achieved.

 

[goffredo]

Me again. The solution is NOT to import photos as 'referenced'. You MUST import copies of photos (i.e., a Managed library). Then, the Places functionality works fine. This is a known bug with Catalina & Photos. If you don't like it, you have to downgrade. Or, like me, just waste a few hundred gigs of hard drive space and let Photos import photos as copies.

Please scroll down to the section, "In Photos 5 on Catalina a referenced library is even more problematic" here:

Disadvantages of a Referenced Library in … - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

 

[Sarah L]

Hi, I'm a newbie too and came here to check an audiobooks problem with Catalina and was horrified to read your thread!
Rushed off to check all of my 48 000 painstakingly geo-tagged photos were showing up in 'places' now that I'm on Catalina.
I have looked and am not convinced they're all there, though probably the majority are, kind of 'phew!'.
One problem at a time though, am getting increasingly frustrated with Apple... :-(

 

[goffredo]

though probably the majority are

It sounds like your photos get copied into the single gigantic Photos library file, called "Managed" mode: Photos "manages" all your photo files so you are never exposed to the individual files, which a lot of people prefer if they don't care to dabble in their photos as the filesystem level. In this scenario the geotags work great on Catalina and you are OK.

In my case, I don't trust Photos to manage all of my precious photo files, and I regularly manipulate my photo files from other non-Apple utilities and from the command line, so I have all my photos as JPEG files in hundreds of folders I have personally organized. I told the Photos app merely to import them as "references" by deselecting the "Importing : Copy items to the Photos Library" preference in the Photos app's General settings panel. This is a subtle difference, but one result is that importing photos as references, the geotags don't work in Catalina.