Photos missing in Catalina upgrade

Is your external drive compatible with Photos 5 on Catalina? It should be locally mounted, not accessed over the network, and it must not have been used for Time Machine backups. Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

Does your library contain items, that are no longer supported after the Catalina upgrade? There are some video formats and image formats , that can no longer be processed on Catalina and may now be causing problems. To et an idea what might now be problematic, have a look at this list for iMovie: About incompatible media in iMovie for macOS - Apple Support

When you drag an image to the desktop you are only saving the preview, not the actual image.

exporting requires access to the original image file, and that seems not to be possible. To check, if Photos can access the original image files, try to open one of the images, that cannot be exported in "Edit" mode and try to apply adjustments.

Can Photos apply adjustments? Then the original is there and can be accessed.

Where are you trying to export to? Are you exporting to a folder on your Desktop or to a folder on a different device? Photos may not have write access to the device. Or may not be able to reach it, if it is a network volume. Try to export to a local folder on your Mac.

You may want to ensure that Photos has full disk access and access to files and folders.

• Open "System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy".
• In the left column of the panel click "Full Disk Access". Enable the checkmark for Photos, if it is there.
• In the left column of the panel click "Files & Folders". Click the + button to add Photos, if it is not listed.

Hi

EDIT: One thing to try first - on your external drive, have you checked the ignore ownership check box in the drive info pane? (See last screenshot)

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In settings/users you can create a new user/password which you can log onto instead of the one you are currently using. If you do that, and try opening the library from that account it will tell us if it is somthing in your current user account that is messed up stopping photos working correctly. (See settings screenshots)

Similarly - if you try in safe mode and try it will give us clues about what might be stopping photos working.

So two separate things to try - create a new user first. If that doesn't work, then try safe mode. In safe mode you could try both users.

I have an archive libarary on an external drive - just checked to make sure, and no problem exporting.

As a suggestion - try creating a new user account, and see if that can sucessfully open the external library.

Another suggestion is to try starting you mac in safe mode and then trying.

Oh yes - and is it just the albums that are missing -or are the photos also missing in the "all photos" view.

Cool - glad it worked.

From what I've seen - some others are experiencing similar.

It is partly why I keep banging on, on here, about backing up photos :-)

That is why suggesting alternate account and or safe mode. It might be somting going on with the current accout - or with dirvers/kexts etc loaded that is stopping the export working correctly.