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I have a 256GB MacBook Pro and I have my photos library being read from an external SSD drive. Every time I try to safely eject the drive, I get an error that says "The disk wasn't ejected because one or more programs may be using it". the only option is to force eject, which I don't want to do. Quiting the Photos app doesn't allow me to safe eject. how can I tackle this problem the right way?
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15
If you shut down and restart, that should close all running applications on your Mac, unless you have some that automatically start from your start up folder. Then click on Apple Logo/Force Quit and close any programs that are listed as open. EDIT: Except you need not close Finder. Then try ejecting.
-- Rich
I guess the photolibraryd or some other process related to Photos is then running in the background doing its stuff. Sometimes I re-try or wait a few minutes but in my experience even using the force eject doesn't do any harm then.
If you haven't any backups of the library, I'd recommend doing that. At one time I used Carbon Copy Cloner to backup the Photos library to a disk image. The first backup took a while but later backups were very fast if there was not much new material in the library. Storage media eventually breaks and also software and user errors occasionally destroy data so it is better to be safe than sorry. All my original images are on plain folders on external HDs but I might also once again backup also the Photos library because recreating it takes a while.
How to eject an external SSD drive that has your Photos library database?
