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Nope still foobar’d! Stuck on ‘downloading 25 originals’. This is after selecting every single one and sending to email, it took hours to download and eventually attempted to create the email but of course crashed, as expected. No idea what these remaining 25 are. What a piece of ****.

I wonder if it’s server side and Apple working on it ASAP... in any event it’s a crock of s...
 
A combination of StumpyBloke's method and upgrading to 13.1.1 seems to have triggered the background downloads. Not moving as fast as I'd like, but it's moving!
 
I thought i would see if I had the same issue on my IPP 2018, so I turned off iCloud Photos, deleted all local ones, restarted the iPad, re-enabled iCloud Photos and yup, its completely and utterly stuck.

I don’t hold out any hope, but I have emailed Tim Cook and pointed him to this thread - nothing to lose I guess.
 
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So I found out that if you open the Photos app and go to the first photo you have in the app and start scrolling down with you finger the blank clouds slowly start to be replaced by the thumbnail of the photo. I had to scroll down very slowly until each thumbnail popped up. I have 65k photos so you can imagine it was very time consuming. If I click on the thumbnail I see the photo. HOWEVER, here is also what I found out. When I go to "About" I always saw my phone showing 65,000 photos although none was there and the storage of my 512GB iPhone was almost empty. Now, when I go to iPhone Storage the bar that shows the storage says I have over 400GB used but only a tiny fraction is recorded as Photos. I now have a huge gray bar on the Storage bar named as "Other". On the same Storage area it says I only have 117GB of Photos, the same number I had 5 days ago when I installed my iCloud backup on the new iPhone.

In sum, I have no idea what is going on. I now see my photos, my iPhone shows storage full of over 400GB but it says only 117GB are photos and the majority of the storage is "Other".
 
Has anyone spoken to Apple about this, or aware of any official word on it?

Yes I’ve been chatting and talking on the phone with them about this. No official answer yet but it has been escalated to the engineering team and they are going to keep me posted.

I told the about this thread to show I’m not the only one but they said they can’t use non Apple sites as data.
 
Figured I’d chime in here.
Same issue with my 11 Pro Max. Been going nuts wondering what I did wrong and I was the only one. I upgraded to 13.1.1 and hoped it would be fixed. Initially it seemed it was better, actually had some movement. Gave it more time and it’s just sitting on downloading 1,750. We’ll see what happens overnight. Hopefully they fix it soon. I got the 512 specifically so I could store all of my full res photos.
 
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The struggle is real with me. I have always complained at the lack of speed and consistency as it relates to original image downloads. The issue is not on my end; gigabit internet.

I have a photo library of over 25,000 photos and videos. It can take weeks for them to completely download in my experience, which is not only inconvenient, but also annoying. One of the main reasons I purchased a 512 GB iPhone is because I can keep a local copy of my photo library on my phone. Oh well. I suppose that's just the price to pay when you want to play...proverbially speaking.
 
Strangely, my iPhone downloaded the remaining 25 overnight, even though it had been stuck at nearly a day doing nothing. However the iPad didn’t download a single one during the last eight hours.
 
Strangely, my iPhone downloaded the remaining 25 overnight, even though it had been stuck at nearly a day doing nothing. However the iPad didn’t download a single one during the last eight hours.

I wonder if Apple servers are simply overloaded and there is a queue, first in first out on there servers?

My iPhone is still stuck uploading one picture. Which was upgraded from x to 11. My iPad was not upgraded and download / upload are finished.
 
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Yes, me too - I am now down into the 5,000s ... 😂

Still a way to go on the overall data volume though. Multiply this up by all the users globally who are backing-up, wiping, re-installing, upgrading right now & it's nigh on a miracle it works at all:

EDIT: this is my Photos library downloaded items onto my (new) iPhone 11 Pro vs my (existing) iPad:

View attachment 862493 View attachment 862496

<BOOM>

After a week & a day mine have just finished - all 23,922. Initially came down in quite large batches from 8,000 > 5,000 and then slowed down doing a hundred or so at a time.

I've not messed with it much - I did try the above 'select / share / email' method, and whilst it seemed to work it just isn't important enough to be bothered. By then I was down to 500 to go and it's too time consuming to find out which 2% 'are missing'.

Upgraded to 13.1.1 yesterday & it didn't make a great deal of immediate difference - also hadn't upgraded iPad from 13.1 to 13.1.1 either & the missing 24 arrived on that of their own accord, all feels very random and server related to me.


17C9647D-D842-427B-B1C3-56906DCDBB89.jpeg
 
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I wonder if Apple servers are simply overloaded and there is a queue, first in first out on there servers?

My iPhone is still stuck uploading one picture. Which was upgraded from x to 11. My iPad was not upgraded and download / upload are finished.

No idea, but if they are its still unacceptable in my opinion. It should not take days to download our own libraries. My IPP still hasn’t budged.
 
No idea, but if they are its still unacceptable in my opinion. It should not take days to download our own libraries. My IPP still hasn’t budged.

true. I turned on download and keep original on my iPP and guess what. Stuck downloading at 237. Not moving. But did notice my iPhone has more photos than my iPad. So something is up with iCloud sync across devices.

I submitted this bug to Apple and no similar bug reported. Maybe it takes time, but surely must be a lot of users with this problem.
 
true. I turned on download and keep original on my iPP and guess what. Stuck downloading at 237. Not moving. But did notice my iPhone has more photos than my iPad. So something is up with iCloud sync across devices.

I submitted this bug to Apple and no similar bug reported. Maybe it takes time, but surely must be a lot of users with this problem.

Absolutely. Judging by the amount of people in this single thread there will be many that are affected. They probably just don’t realise.
 
After I did what I posted in my last post above it seems that it triggered the download. I now have 250GB of photos showing on my iPhone storage and the "Other" gray bar is turning into "Photos". My Photos app says still 23k photos downloading but I think that is wrong. I still have my iPhone XS intact until my 11 gets all downloaded so I can compare. The XS shows 400GB of photos while the 11 is still showing 250GB.
 
It's somewhat "comforting" to see everyone else is having this issue. What an embarrassing situation for Apple... and a frustrating one for its users.

Same problem for me... it's been downloading for 4 days now... now stuck all day at 5,992 left (out of just shy of 15k). The photo management system really needs to be updated as far as Apple are concerned. I wish, like Google photos, it showed the progress of each photo as it was uploading or downloading.

The Optimise iPhone thing option is nice - but I got this 512GB phone so I can have my photos and vides on it. We don't live in some all Californian Apple dream world where we all have instant Wifi or 4G everywhere.

Let's hope Apple fix this ASAP - but as a bug fix of 13.1 hasn't fixed it.. it's not looking promising.
 
It's somewhat "comforting" to see everyone else is having this issue. What an embarrassing situation for Apple... and a frustrating one for its users.

Same problem for me... it's been downloading for 4 days now... now stuck all day at 5,992 left (out of just shy of 15k). The photo management system really needs to be updated as far as Apple are concerned. I wish, like Google photos, it showed the progress of each photo as it was uploading or downloading.

The Optimise iPhone thing option is nice - but I got this 512GB phone so I can have my photos and vides on it. We don't live in some all Californian Apple dream world where we all have instant Wifi or 4G everywhere.

Let's hope Apple fix this ASAP - but as a bug fix of 13.1 hasn't fixed it.. it's not looking promising.

Not only this, i have also been trying to update to 13.1.1 for a day now and getting connection errors. I also tried a few minutes ago and this time it said that i am up to date (i have 13.1).
 
Yes, me too - I am now down into the 5,000s ... 😂

Still a way to go on the overall data volume though. Multiply this up by all the users globally who are backing-up, wiping, re-installing, upgrading right now & it's nigh on a miracle it works at all:

EDIT: this is my Photos library downloaded items onto my (new) iPhone 11 Pro vs my (existing) iPad:

View attachment 862493 View attachment 862496
The part „optimise photos“ still has the wrong storage number. 68.4 MB. 😂

Mine hasn‘t been downloaded over night too. I had my phone on the charger. I think we should have it on our chargers and then open the photos app
 
Mine didn't do anything either. Sometimes I restart my phone in the morning and it starts downloading. But then it stops after a while and no matter what I do it won't continue until the next day.

Which is starting to make me think there's a daily quotum or something.

Still - I pay for iCloud and for the phone. It's unacceptable.
 
First world problems but while Apple is sooooo slow Amazon is toooo fast. I have all my photos in both iCloud and Amazon Photos. While iCloud is taking forever to download the photos to my new phone Amazon photos does not recognize I just updated my phone and thus thinks I have all new photos to be uploaded. Result: I have a library of 65k photos and now my Amazon Photo has 130k photos. It is ALL duplicated. How come two of the most important tech companies in the world cannot figure things out?
 
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