macOS Catalina (10.15) is now available

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Wow. Well this is a complete mess. So I was on vacation and when I got home last night, I checked my iMac and MacBook Air to make sure the photos and videos all synced fine to iCloud from my iPhone. I specifically had some videos I wanted to merge together using software on the MBA. All is good on the iMac. The MBA? It started to sync, then kinda stopped. I could see placeholders for some of the videos but not all of them, and they wouldn't play. They never synced. After a couple hours, I let it be for the night and used the iMac to do what I needed to do. This morning, with nothing changed, I started troubleshooting. Toggled iCloud Photos off and on; disabled, then re-enabled Photos via the Apple ID preference pane; deleted the library and created a new one; nothing. Nothing will sync. I then signed out of iCloud completely and back in. Nothing. My Photos library, due to scrapping the old and starting over, is completely blank. The photos and videos are not lost and are accessible on my iDevices and iMac, but not on the MacBook Air. I'm about out of ideas, and patience.

On my iMac, for some reason it got stuck in a loop trying to connect or sync to my iPad after I updated that to the new iOS release last night. I can't quit Finder to reset that, nor will the OS even let me log out or reboot. Turning the iPad off doesn't help. Catalina is a legit disaster. This truly is entering Vista-level territory.
 
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Sync through iCloud is very, very slow as it operates in the background. I recently had an experience where syncing 9000 new images took three weeks to complete. Like you, some synced immediately, others showed icons or fuzzy images as they were partially synced, and some just weren't there until the process finished. It's not Catalina, this happened on Mojave. I think it's part of the low priority iCloud uses for syncing images. And by trying what you did, you basically reset the sync with each login/logout, so you are back to where you were before you started trying to help.

If you want to make it faster, just use Image Capture from the MBA to grab the files from the iPhone directly.
 
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Sync through iCloud is very, very slow as it operates in the background. I recently had an experience where syncing 9000 new images took three weeks to complete. Like you, some synced immediately, others showed icons or fuzzy images as they were partially synced, and some just weren't there until the process finished. It's not Catalina, this happened on Mojave. I think it's part of the low priority iCloud uses for syncing images. And by trying what you did, you basically reset the sync with each login/logout, so you are back to where you were before you started trying to help.

If you want to make it faster, just use Image Capture from the MBA to grab the files from the iPhone directly.

I had about a dozen photos and 5 videos totaling about 2 minutes in total to sync from iCloud. That shouldn't have taken much more than 20 minutes. Certainly not 2 hours and most definitely not the entire night. One last short video I made after we got home last night showed up on my iMac within a couple minutes. Even now, having started over with a new Photos library this morning, I should have seen "something" show up by now... something, anything, but I have literally nothing showing up here after about 5-6 hours since starting with a new Photos Library. I'm about to try one more idea to kickstart it, but this shouldn't be this problematic.

I finally fixed the Finder being hung up trying to connect to the iPad. There was a process in Activity Monitor titled AmpDevicesAgent that was pegging over 100% of the CPU. Force-quitting that fixed the hangup. (EDIT: ok, no that didn't fix it. The Finder isn't giving me an indication anymore that it's trying to sync to the iPad, but I still can't log out. Grrrr......) (EDIT 2: Ok, quitting the remaining AmpDevices... processes worked. There were three more differing in name, though they showed no signs of being hung up or otherwise pegging the CPU.)

Last edit: so all of a sudden everything is syncing in Photos. Unlike last night when I had the placeholders frozen in place, when I double-click a video, I now either have a complete video or a pie icon showing the download in progress (which then takes just 2-5 seconds to download). I very seriously had a completely blank library still an hour or so ago.
 
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Hey, FYI all, 10.15.1 just dropped.
 
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I use accounting software called Account Edge. It has warned me not to update to Catalina because it will not be compatible at this time.
I hope this doesn't mean I will have to pay for an upgrade, but it probably does.
 
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'I hope this doesn't mean I will have to pay for an upgrade'

Not necessarily.

As Catalina is still in it's infancy I would stick with the OS you have at present so you can continue using Account Edge. In time Account Edge may well issue a compatible version for Cataline and it is at that time you make any decisions concerning additional payment for updated software if, indeed, they do charge for it.
 

Rod


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Prior to getting involved in beta testing of iOS versions I used to wait until the next macOS version was released before upgrading to the previous version. Right now Mojave is pretty stable and will continue to run any 32bit apps you may have. My guess is that your accounting app will be updated before September next year.
Just be aware that there are a few considerations regarding iOS 13. If you upgrade your iPhone to the current operating system there are some functions that rely on Catalina for full functionality.
Again there is no real need to upgrade to iOS 13 yet either.
 

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