Photos Problems with Catalina 10.15.7.

I have had several problems with Photos under the OSX Catalina 10.15.7.

1.   Difficulty exporting - ‘unknown error’

2.   Lots of duplicates caused by the extension changing from .jpg to .jpeg

3.   Inability you open after a ‘repair’ ­- error 3154.

I recently consolidated several old photos libraries into my system photos library.  From 1968 to 2017 I had kept a separate library per year because iPhoto did not seem to work well with large numbers of photos.  The number of photos per year was between a few hundred and in one case around 9,000.  In total I have around 90,000 photos.  I want one library so that (a) I can see all photos on all devices (via iCloud); (b) it can match faces, events etc. across all my photos.

I wish Photos had the facility to simply move photos between libraries, but as that is not the case I found the best way is to export unmodified originals from the old library to a temporary folder, then import then into the system library.  This method keeps the original file name (except the extension), the capture date and the time.

1.   Exporting worked for all but one of the legacy libraries.  This one (2014) only exports a few hundred of the 6071 photos then says that the rest cannot be exported ‘due to an unknown error’.  There is much on the internet about the problem in Catalina, some claiming it was fixed in a previous version.  I am using the current version.  I tried other types of export, including drag and drop, but none worked.  I tried rebuilding the library: once does not help and if I do it a second time all the photos disappear.  I

tried opening it on another machine running OS X Sierra but it could not open it.  When I investigated some of the photos that were not exported, I found that they also cannot be edited, with

the error message ‘unable to load adjustments for this image’.

2.   Importing worked fine, but I realized rather late that the new version of Photos had exported the files with a .jpeg extension, when they had a .jpg extension originally. What’s more, the photos with the new extension were not recognized as being the same as the ones with the old extension, so I created a lot of duplicates.  I was able to circumvent this problem with later transfers by changing the extensions to .jpg in the temporary folder, with ‘rename all’ in  Finder.  I think (a) Photos should not change extensions unless selected in a preference (b) photos that are identical apart from the extension should be recognized as the same and therefore ‘already imported’.

3. The worst problem is that after three days of consolidation I had a problem Photos hanging while sorting my albums, so I force quit it and restarted it.  It would not open, so I rebuilt the library.  It still will not open – error 3154.  A repeated rebuild does not help.  So now I cannot access any photos.

This is most frustrating.  I sincerely hope that Apple will quickly make a new release that will solve these problems. In the meantime, if anyone can suggest a workaround to problems 1 or 3, please let me know!

Summary of suggestions for Apple re Photos

1. Add a facility to move or copy photos directly from one library to another
2. If exporting using filename, use the original extension as well.
3. Ensure that export always works. If I can see the photos in the app, then it must be possible to export them!
4. Recognize 'already imported' photos preferably by content; in any case the extension should be ignored.
5. Ensure that repair and rebuild always works. The whole point of them should be to fix errors and to bring the library up to the latest standard.