Adding photos to a Mac album from a Shared Photo Album - Can't be done !

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29 points

Adding photos to a Mac album from a Shared Photo Album - Can't be done !

Hi, my friend created a shared photo album so I could view all the photos of a recent trip. Now I want to get these into a new album on my Mac for permanent storage, after which we can delete the Shared Album.

But I can't achieve this: if I select all the photos/videos [here there are 486 photos & 13 videos], right-click and choose add to album (having previously created the new empty album) I get the error message "The operation couldn't be completed.(PHAssetExportRequestErrorDomain error 2)."

If I try dragging/dropping all the photos into my new Mac album nothing happens.

Alternatively I thought maybe I import all first then make a new album from this import, so again I select all photos, right-click and choose Import. Again nothing gets imported.

Perhaps there is a limit on number of simultaneous photos you can operate on? At any rate it would be good to know the best method of achieving a new album on my Mac from a Shared Photo album.

Thanks anyone,

DonSimon

MacBook Pro mid-2013

Catalina 10.15.7

Posted on Feb 26, 2021 6:14 AM

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Answer 1

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tetters Author

Level 1

29 points

Feb 28, 2021 8:57 AM in response to léonie

Thanks leonie (excuse no accent)

My workaround eventually:

Export all photos in the Shared Album to my Mac Downloads folder
Import all these into Photos, selecting as destination my new, empty Mac Album

And yes, I now have all 486 photos in my Mac Album, and that Import was all done in one operation! And it's a plus that you can direct them straight into your newly created Mac Album.I notice also that they don't appear in the Imports album, I'm fine with that!

All I have to do now is make a note of this so I don't bother the forum with the same question once a year!

I think this is the only practical solution because trying to do it all within Photos just doesn't work.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

197,123 points

Feb 28, 2021 7:55 AM in response to tetters

I am seeing this error "The operation couldn't be completed.(PHAssetExportRequestErrorDomain error 2).", when I am selecting several photos at once in the smart album for importing, and one of them has already been imported. As a test you may want to import smaller groups of photos, not all at once.

Can you import a single photo?
If you can import a single photo, select more and try to import them. When the error occurs again, select less , until you can import further photos.

Try out this way to isolate the photos, that cannot be imported with a batch of photos and skip them.

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Answer 3

tetters Author

Level 1

29 points

Feb 28, 2021 7:10 AM in response to tetters

I've noticed that I wrote here a year ago with same problem; it turned out that booting in Safe Mode fixed the import problem then, but it doesn't now. Now nothing appears in the Import folder.

The only difference is that then I owned the Shared Photo Album, this time I'm just a subscriber. Do I need the Owner to give me a permission to use the photos?

I've already done the Option open of Photos and it created a new PhotoLibrary which is now set as my default library.

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