I see this is a common problem but it seems people were missing photos from various locations and whatnot, whereas I have painstakingly gone through my Sim's collection and they're all labelled properly by location. I originally built her a large photography gallery as a separate building on the same lot as her family's house, and have since built a connecting walkway between the house and the gallery in case it wasn't counting as the same house somehow (but does it matter, since everything is on the same lot anyways?).
Here's the breakdown of what the gallery has now:
10+ photos from Egypt, worth over $17,000
10+ photos from China, worth over $24,000
10+ photos from France, worth over $9,000
10+ photos from Home (Moonlight Falls), worth over $13,000
Grand total gallery worth for just those 40 photos: $63,000
The gallery is worth more since I was rounding down and didn't count a metric freak-ton of pics she's taken in Moonlight Falls for the various photography collections. All of those are on the gallery walls too. Yesterday I realized she didn't have enough pictures from France and thus went there to take more and fixed that issue. Her lifetime wish still didn't fulfill.
As of today, I have tried the following things in order:
1. Connecting the gallery and the house with the walkway on the third floor.
2. Taking each of the photos I checked for value and location label off of the walls, then placing them back on the walls.
3. Restarting the game and unpausing it for a few seconds.
No dice. Any ideas?
I'm going to be really annoyed if it's somehow not counting the pictures because they're in the other building, or not counting them *now* because she already had them before I built the walkway. I suppose I could try doing a big fell-sweep travel session, getting 10 photos everywhere again that will easily pass $25,000 in value and keep them all in the camera, then place them on a new floor of the gallery (or even the house temporarily), all in one go... but that is a lot of work I've technically already done, even if it wasn't all in one go. Plus, I have a feeling the camera would glitch out and inconveniently lose photos whenever it wants to (I have yet to see that happen but I've read it can).
Edit 2/22/2015: Okay, the problem was that I needed ten different types of images from each place. So they needed to be of different titles or categories, aka Objects or Furniture or anything that gets its own title stamp on the picture automatically without you naming it. I did this lifetime wish with a different Sim in another game and tested the theory after thinking of it a little while ago. That's what it was... and just to be sure, I did 40 uniquely titled images, no duplicates at all (like not using two Objects from Egypt and France). I'm not sure if you have to get that diverse, but if the wish is still glitching for you, try making sure all 40 pics are of different things.