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Vaterslote Author

Level 1

4 points

New Photos version required with no updates available?

I have a photo library on my 5TB external drive that came from a previous Mac running Catalina. (I do not want to pay to use icloud for the amount of photos storage I have) My newer iMac just arrived but it will not load the external drive Photos Library. When I try to load 'other library' (Option + Photos Icon; Other Library; external Hard drive; Photos Library) It says unsupported library and asks for a newer version of Photos to be installed. How can the external drive Photos Library be newer than the new iMac when there are no updates available for Photos.

My new iMac says it is running Photos 5.0

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 4, 2020 4:55 AM

Top-ranking reply

Eau Rouge

Level 8

42,596 points

Posted on Aug 4, 2020 5:31 AM

Which version of Catalina is your new iMac running, and then compare it with the version your previous mac was running.

If the new iMac has a lower version of Catalina installed on it compared to the previous macs version of Catalina

that would explain the new iMac being unable to open the photos library.

For example if you updated your previous mac to 10.15.6 which was only released a couple of weeks ago

the photos library would have been updated too.

But it is most likely that your new iMac has been sitting about in a warehouse for months and has an earlier

version of Catalina, let's say version 10.15.3. The older version of Catalina will need to be updated to 10.15.6

in order for it to see the updated photos library.

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New Photos version required with no updates available?

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