After Catalina upgrade Photos System Library on external HD cannot connect to iCloud and iOS any more

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After Catalina upgrade Photos System Library on external HD cannot connect to iCloud and iOS any more

I have more than 600Gb of photos and videos stored in a Photos Library on an external HD I set and used as System Library with iCloud for years. I recently upgraded to Catalina. After the upgrade the System Library on the external HD is not connected with iCloud any more and can not re-connect with iCloud by checking the box in Photo preferences panel (see screenshot).

Dialog offers „Optimise Storage“ (see screenshot) and refuses to download all photos to my local hard drive on my Mac because there is not enough space which - thanks but no thanks- I never asked for because I have enough storage space on my external HD.

Fact of the matter is my Photos System Library and my iOS devices are not connected via iCloud any more.

Any one has a solution to share ?

Posted on May 31, 2020 10:00 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

léonie

Level 10

195,013 points

May 31, 2020 10:38 AM in response to glenrothes

Can you tell us please more about the external volume with your system photos library?

Photos 5 on Catalina is more rigidly checking the suitability of an external volume than previous versions of Photos because of the new security measures in Catalina.

You cannot make a library the System Photo Library on an external vilume,

if the file system of the external volume is not MacOS Extended (Journaled) or APFS
if the volume has been used for Time Machine or other backup software is insatalled
if the volume is not locally mounted using a wired connection.

As a test, try to set the ignore Ownership on this volume flag. If the flag cannot be set, the volume is not suitable for your system photo library, see: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201517

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Answer 2

glenrothes Author

Level 1

13 points

May 31, 2020 11:09 AM in response to léonie

My external HD is a stardom 2x2TB MacOS Extended (Journaled)
The external HD Mediadisk is properly connected via USB 3.0 and standing next to my Mac
the external HD stores only Media files , iMovie, Music (iTunes), Photos , GoPro videos
TimeMachine syncs my Mac to a separate Synology NAS, no time machine sync to the Mediadisk, no software backups etc to be found on the HD
As you can see from my screenshots the "Ignore ownership" flag is set,

HD does not seem to be the issue

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Answer 3

glenrothes Author

Level 1

13 points

Jun 4, 2020 10:20 AM in response to léonie

I am not sure that a lack of iOS space is what causes the problem that the Photos on icloud, MAC and iOS are slightly different.

My phone has appox. 180 GB of unused space. This sounds enough for reduced/optimised versions of the photos

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Answer 4

léonie

Level 10

195,013 points

May 31, 2020 11:41 AM in response to glenrothes

That looks fine.

The problem seems to be, that you have only 351GB of free storage on your external volume with the library and your library in iCloud has a size of 600GB. iCloud does not allow you to enable iCloud Photos, because the 600GB from Cloud will not fit on the external volume, in addition to the library you are aready having on the volume. Photos is estimating the size of the library based on the worst case assumption that all photos in iCloud are different from the photos in yur current library.

To fix this, enable iCloud Photos for this library with "Optimise Storage" enabled. This will allow you to get iCloud Photos enabled again, and once the library starts syncing again, you can turn off "Optimise Storage".

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Answer 5

glenrothes Author

Level 1

13 points

Jun 3, 2020 11:49 PM in response to léonie

Thank you Léonie- I did as you said. I moved files from the mediadisk. Photos did upload all 600Gb to iCloud.

Some operations seems to be in process. Does not look like Photos on Mac and iOS devices are in full sync but I will give another day or two.

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Answer 6

léonie

Level 10

195,013 points

Jun 4, 2020 12:31 AM in response to glenrothes

You can compare your Photos Library on your Mac to the iCloud version, if look at the library in a web browser, just open the Photos.app at www.icloud.com with your iCloud AppleID.

If the iOS devices are not yet in sync with iCloud, there may not be enough local storage on the iOS devices to download the photos from iCloud, even optimised. The thumbnails and previews of the optimised versions will need local storage on your iPhone or iPad, as an estimate, at least 10% of the storage in iCloud. Can you afford to use 60GB to 120GB of local storage for the optimised versions of your iCloud Photos on your iPhone or ipad?

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Answer 7

glenrothes Author

Level 1

13 points

Jun 7, 2020 9:36 AM in response to glenrothes

Photos on my iMac did upload approx. 40.000 files to iCloud and stopped syncing/uploading . The remaining approx. 5.000 files do NOT upload to iCloud for several days now. Tried pausing / resuming and several complete restarts but sync is stuck and will not proceed. Activity monitor looks like Photos is connected to iCloud. I have 1,2TB of empty space left in iCloud , we are not running out of space. Any idea ?

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After Catalina upgrade Photos System Library on external HD cannot connect to iCloud and iOS any more

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