How to fix the disk space error when importing photos on Sonoma 14.4?

I have to admit that if this true, I am furious. I've used an external drive to store 'photos' libraries for more than 10 years and have never been told of the corruption issue concerning ex-Fat. The inconvenience of reformatting is massive and unforgivable.

I am having a similar issue. Ample space on an external drive. Depending on how I import it:

• via iPhone; no error message but does nothing when importing
• via local file folder; says it does not recognize the format

:/

My external disk is APFS formatted, has been since I set it up last year, and I'm having this problem when attempting to import both JPG and PNG images, though I haven't tried any other formats. Sonoma 14.5, M1 Air 2020.

So no, it's not an exFAT matter, or not exclusively an exFAT matter.

However, the disk is also encrypted via the standard macOS tools in Disk Utility (password required on disk mount), and it's been partitioned to do 50/50 duty as a Time Machine volume, so it is arguably no longer a plain-vanilla APFS volume.

If the only way to get a photos library to function properly on an external volume is to disable its macOS-provided encryption, or to use only unpartitioned media, this is a matter that Apple needs to address.

I have not attempted reformatting, nor do I intend to. Apple isn't Microsoft. The solution is not "format and reinstall".

Problem solved, but it wasn't easy.

1. Copied my Photo Library file to another external drive.
2. Reformatted original external drive to APFS using "Erase" in Disk Utility
3. Copied Photo Library back to original external drive.
4. Started Phots app by selecting Photo Library file. The computer took several hours to Restore the file. It seemed to have needed to do it twice
5. Yah, now it works. Obviously you can skip step one if you have a new external hard drive to spare.

Back story details:

I've been using the same external hard drive for years without problem and had ample space. Got errors below depending on how I tried to import:

• via iPhone; no error message but does nothing when importing
• via local file folder; says it does not recognize the format

I tried using the "First Aid function in Disk Utility. I needed to restart the computer as it was not able to unmount. Eventually it did its thing and actually fixed the errors (I'm assuming every time I tried to do an import and error was created), but this did not enable me to do imports.

> external disk

What format is the disk??

Photos libraries must be stored on APFS or MacOS Extended volumes. exFat, NTFS etc are not supported and might very well corrupt the library.

Running first aid in disk utilities do the trick in my case

Hans1Steven wrote:

I have to admit that if this true, I am furious. I've used an external drive to store 'photos' libraries for more than 10 years and have never been told of the corruption issue concerning ex-Fat. The inconvenience of reformatting is massive and unforgivable.

"Unforgivable?" Apple documents clearly its requirement to format an external drive properly for Photos libraries:

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

"Prepare your storage device

Make sure that your external storage device, such as a USB drive or Thunderbolt drive, is formatted for Mac: either APFS format or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format."

Photos was not intended to to be super-secure. There are little dabs of security, but it is not an app that provides full security by any means. The primary security source is the computer login. While it doesn't seem to be expressly documented, experience indicates that a Photos Library cannot be used with an encrypted volume. You can see this:

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

which explicitly states "either APFS format or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format."

Photos constantly accesses the Photos Library in the background, and it's probable that encryption makes that impossible.

If you need your pictures to be encrypted, then the Photos app may not be your best choice.

I will definitely not format the drive to half-solve this mess. 😅

I got a workaround by using Photomator to import photos to my library – but this is clearly not an elegant solution.

Perhaps your setup (machine+OS+external drive) works with ExFat. In my case, it definitely was the issue with that. APFS now even shows free space, as compared to previously taking a very long time to display that info. I also had issues where the external drive would simply not show up on Finder upon startup. That problem has also disappeared.

Transfer/reformat/retransfer of files took 4 days as I had to use multiple older less capacity hard drives for this exercise. Totally worth it given how it all works seamlessly now. All the best!

I am having a similar issue, but I don't get an error message or any other notification when I try to import. I click "Import All New Items" and then it goes to recent imports screen and nothing happens. No progress circle, or anything else. Nothing imports. My disk is a SanDisk Portable SSD with plenty of space. I'm using Photos Version 9.0 (646.2.101) on Mac OS Sonoma 14.4.1 (23E224). Everything is up to date, to my knowledge. The disk works fine for viewing and editing photos, just not importing. Any advice? Thanks in advance.

MacMacMacintosh wrote: Same here. Sonoma 14.4. external HDD in APFS format. Library size is about 700 GB.

It's really hard to figure out what you mean by "Same here" The original poster's problem was that his external drive was formatted in ExFat, but you say that yours is APFS, so this is not the same, at all.

Perhaps you should start a new post and describe what's going on with enough detail that someone can hlep.

Just run disc utility. And do a first aid.

the system will scan your external drive, finds no problem. But it will fix your photo issue.

i did this an all was well.

even i had to do this with the app numbers syncing on the cloud