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Error when importing images into Photos / images can be opened normally

I have an issue on Catalina (10.15.7) where I can not import old archive of iPhone images into Photos application.


I tried on 2 macs with Catalina, and it is a no go. I get the usual the image can not be opener because of unsupported format and below by the image name it says that the image can not be accessed.


  • I repaired the drive, checked privileges and nothing helps.
  • All images show and open normally in Preview
  • If I save an image in Preview, it can be added to Photos


Any idea what I should do? - This is an old iPhone 4 archive, and I allready successfully imported archives from 3GS and iPhone 5.


Any help appreciated.

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 26, 2020 5:04 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Dec 27, 2020 5:52 AM

A Photos Library can get damaged, when you copy it to a a NTFS drive or a NAS. Use only locally mounted volumes prepared as described here to move your Photos Libraries between Macs: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support


3 replies

Dec 27, 2020 5:16 AM in response to TonyCollinet

It was, but I copied internally. It did seem to me that the permissions are kind of trivial on mac.


The files were copied from NAS to another mac, and then to a NTFS drive and then carried to destination mac and copied there.


Whatever I did I couldn't import, but in the end I managed to do it by copying the folder first to original source mac (where I made the archive), and then making a copy for it. Then I tried import in local photos library and it worked. After that I moved destination library to source mac and imported photos there and it worked.


How? - I don't have a slightest clue. On Windows I can quite simply just take over the ownership of the file or folder, but on Mac these mysterious things happen for which one needs magic to solve.


Error when importing images into Photos / images can be opened normally

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