Error 36 with Iphoto

Hi.

What is dot cleanse? It is not advised to use any "cleaning" or "speed up" apps on a mac.

Is the external drive correctly set up for using with a photos library?

It must be formatted APFS or MacOS extended (journaled), and not be (or have been) used for time machine. It must have the 'ignore ownership" checkbox ticked. It should not be on a memory stick, SD or similar. It stands to reason that if you want any sort of reasonable performance it should be a fast drive with a fast connection.

It must also not be a network drive (a direct connection is required - eg USB or Thunderbolt)

See

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201517

63Stevieb wrote:

Can you advise where the ignore ownership checkbox is on the hard drive - thanks again for answering

If the "IgnoreOwnership" flag should not be available for the external volume, it is an indication, that the volume is not compatible with Photos, either because the file system format is wrong or the volume has been used for Time Machine backups or has any software installed, that is modifying the access rights. For example, a network share would be completely unsuitable.

It would also be bad, if one of the volumes has a case-sensitive format and the other volume not.

If your library used to be an iPhoto Library and is very old, you may have imported items to the library with very long filenames or filenames with special characters in the name. For example, Facebook synching used to mess up iPhoto Libraries or Aperture Libraries occasionally by adding files with very long filenames and all kinds of ctrl-characters in the filenames. These filenames might be causing the error-36 and cannot be avoided without removing these files from the library.

See also this user tip from Leonie about error 36:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250002206

Click on the drive in finder, and open up the info panel (Cmd-I). It is at the bottom.

What is ‘Error 36’?