How do I force iCloud to sync Photos on Mac?

My iCloud Photo Library has worked flawlessly forever. Currently, my MacOS Photos (High Sierra) won't download pics I took today that are already on my phone and have been uploaded to iCloud already (confirmed by logging in to iCloud.com). In Photos on MacOS it says "Last Updated at 12:51pm" which was over 9 hours ago. I'm currently on WiFi and plugged in to power. Any ideas? I've tried rebooting and force quit the Photos Agent from Activity Monitor with no success.

first place I would check is the systems preferences < iCloud - and next Photos preferences and make sure all the setting are set properly?

maybe a setting got changed?

first place I would check is the systems preferences < iCloud - and next Photos preferences and make sure all the setting are set properly?

maybe a setting got changed?

Unfortunately no, all settings are correct and haven't changed.

Sorry I don't have much to add - except that if it comes to signing out of iCloud and back in be very careful.

Lots of stories here about lost photos and after signing out and back in.

Might be good to back up your photos on a hard drive before you "Sign out and back into iCloud" - if it comes to that.

btownguy, did you ever make it anywhere with this one? I'm running into the same thing, photos from my phone are uploading to icloud.com Photos just fine, just won't sync down to my iMac. It's been 12 days now. Did try léonie's suggestion on this page (deleting container cache data), looked like it might help but then ended up doing nothing in the end. It's almost as though I lost the preference for my system library, and the photos are being synced into another Photos library (but I checked, and it is the right one).

One thing of potential note is, the library is pretty big at this point (138k photos). But, the phone and icloud.com don't seem to have any issue with that.

Wow, yet another Mac bug sneaking up on my wife's computer, an issue that goes waaaaaaaaaaay back and still no fix to force a sync or even see progress so we know what's going on. Photos taken hours and days ago still not appearing on her Mac. At this point it's easier to list the Apple products that are working rather than the long list of junk that isn't. Way to earn that premium price point, Apple!
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OK hey guess what, I just came up with a solution poking around in Activity Monitor. Just quit Photos and go into Activity Monitor (inside Applications > Utilities), find a process called photolibraryd and force quit it. Then launch Photos again. Bob's your uncle.

You're welcome, Apple!

2021 and still having photo sync issues with Big Sur. The photos are there in my iCloud which I've verified with my browser. The Photos app just refuses to download them. It defeats the whole purpose of automatic sync when you have to start babysitting it like this, and the worst part is there isn't even a manual control. Absolute FAIL on this one, Apple.

Just quit Photos and go into Activity Monitor (inside Applications > Utilities), find a process called photolibraryd and force quit it. Then launch Photos again. Bob's your uncle.

That didn't work for me.

This is infuriating.

So I tried the "repair library" function for Photos. And it's just been sitting there ALL DAY saying "Restoring from iCloud ..."
What a smelly, steaming, fly ridden pile of $%^& this iCloud sync is.

Well how many Gb of data are you having to download?
If you are lucky enough for it to work consistently at 2mb sec and you only have 24Gb which isn't that much, then that's about 3.5 hours.
It's not uncommon when backing up that sort of quantity of data for it to take all night.
It's just maths.

I wasn't backing anything up. I was just waiting for a few photos to sync from iCloud and it took all day. It should have taken a few seconds. Useless. And this is on a regular basis.

The repair function shouldn't be downloading large amounts of data. All it does is repair the local database and then syncs it with iCloud. Even if it tried to download everything (and it shouldn't be storing everything locally), then I have 3GB. (2 minutes). I'm not retarded.

The worst part is Photos keeps saying "Updated Just Now" even when there have been new photos on iCloud for hours. It just straight up lies.