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Cant find 50,000 photos!

I have a macbook pro and somehow I've lost the "mapping" of my photos. When I open the normal photo icon in the Dock, I get a weird subset of eight random photos and no matter what I try in Finder or elsewhere, I cannot find my photo folder and files.

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.12

Posted on May 3, 2020 5:18 AM

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Posted on May 3, 2020 5:39 AM

What happened, before your photos vanished? Did you just install a system update, or what has changed?


What you need to find ist Photos Library.photoslibrary. Usually, the Photos Library is in your Pictures folder. Or did you keep your Photos Library on an external volume? Where did you store the Photos Library?


When you launch Photos while holding down the options key ⌥, you should be seeing a library chooser dialog. Does this dialog show more than one library? if yes, try all libraries in turn.




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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 3, 2020 5:39 AM in response to jamesdow2

What happened, before your photos vanished? Did you just install a system update, or what has changed?


What you need to find ist Photos Library.photoslibrary. Usually, the Photos Library is in your Pictures folder. Or did you keep your Photos Library on an external volume? Where did you store the Photos Library?


When you launch Photos while holding down the options key ⌥, you should be seeing a library chooser dialog. Does this dialog show more than one library? if yes, try all libraries in turn.




May 3, 2020 6:02 AM in response to jamesdow2

By the way, the only thing that changed was that I have been “exploring” how to import photos from my Mac hard drive into a new app on my MacBook Pro - Capture One. I’m really frustrated with the inability for me to drag and drop photos from Photos directly into Capture One for editing. I’m not that sharp on the computer, can you tell? 70 years old and still trying, so that’s something...

May 3, 2020 6:37 AM in response to jamesdow2

jamesdow2 wrote:

... I found the folder in pictures (there are multiple photos folders, which scares me, but only one folder with 160gb of data.

What does the icon of this library look like? Does it show a fan of three pictures with the rainbow coloured flower?

If it has the proper Photos Library icon try the following: Double click the library with the size of 160GB.

Does it open in Photos or does it give an error message?

What does happen?


The many small Photos Libraries may have been created, when Photos could not open the proper library.


Cant find 50,000 photos!

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