A merge, copy, or duplicate search stalls without further progress

If you are performing a duplicate search, a merge, or another long photo copying operation and PowerPhotos reaches a point where it no longer seems to be making progress, here are the recommended troubleshooting options.

Make sure it’s actually stuck

First, take a minute to look at the progress being shown by PowerPhotos and see if the progress bar or messages are changing at all. If things are still moving, even if very slowly, the best bet is to simply let it proceed.

If it’s really stuck, cancel and try again

If the progress is indeed stuck and has been so for at least several minutes, then you can click the “Cancel” button to cancel the current merge/copy/duplicate search. If you were doing a duplicate search, start a new search with the same setup as before. If you were doing a merge, you can follow the same instructions for restarting an incomplete merge as when a merge is interrupted by a crash. If you’ve tried the same thing multiple times and it gets stuck in the same way every time though, then it’s time to do something different.

If it gets stuck every time

The primary reason for PowerPhotos stalling in the middle of a large operation is if it has sent a request or command to Photos and is waiting for a response, but Photos never returns a response to PowerPhotos. The requests that PowerPhotos makes are handled by a background process called “photolibraryd” which handles actually reading and writing data from the library database, even if the Photos app itself isn’t running.

The best solution when this happens is to restart photolibraryd to get it out of whatever weird state it’s in. There are a couple ways to do this, here’s the order I recommend them in.

1. Go to the Apple menu and choose “Log Out” to log out of your user account, then log back in with your username and password.
2. Alternately, you can just restart your Mac
3. If you’ve got other things going on and really don’t want to log out of your user account entirely, then you can open Activity Monitor, find the “photolibraryd” process in the process list, and force quit it. You’ll want to quit both Photos and PowerPhotos before doing this. It’s still recommended to log out if you can though, since that performs a clean shutdown of photolibraryd rather than a force quit.

If you continue having trouble completing your merge/copy/duplicate search, then contact our tech support and we can investigate your case further.