How do I access the master files in Photos

If you have the PowerPhotos app on your Mac, can you open your Photos library by doing a control-click on the Photos library icon and selecting "Open With/PowerPhotos"?

If your Photos library is already is designated as the system photo library, you might also try accessing its contents through iMovie via the Photos item in the iMovie media sidebar. I don't know if iMovie can read a corrupted library, but might be worth a try.

Following lèonie's suggestion elsewhere on this forum, for the future you might keep a separate back up of your photos in the Finder outside of the Photos app structure. Then if the Photos library goes south you still have your photos intact. I organize mine in subfolders by year.

-- Rich

Hi

Your "all users have access" Statement triggers some alarms with me. I take it you are sharing the library on the external drive between different users?

If so is the "Ignore ownership" checkbox selected for the drive (see screenshot from the drive info pane). If it isn't, you will have continuous problems with permissions in the library every time a different user tries to access it. This could easily create the sort of problems you are seeing.

I thought there was a masterfile location, but it doesn't seem to have all the files. Wish I would've gotten them out a long time ago

The internal format of the Photos Library has been changed considerably after the upgrade to macOS 10.15 Catalina. Since then it is no longer easy to recover the original master files directly from the library. The "Masters" folder has been replaced by "originals", and the new "Originals" folder is no longer human readable. Only Photos can find our original files there, because Photos is renaming the originals by new, unique hexadecimal codes. And the originals are no longer stored in nice subfolders named by the year-month-day of import. If you are using iCloud Photos the file creation dates are no longer the capture dates and the capture dates may be wrong or missing. Trying to recreate the library from the images in this folder will be a lot of work. If you can get Photos to work, use "File > Export > Export unmodified Originals" to make a backup copy of all original image files. Enable the checkmark "IPTC as XPM" to write sidecar files with the titles, keywords, and locations, and I would use the subfolder format "Moment Name" to group photos taken at the same locations and time in subfolders named like the moment.

As a test launch Photos with the Option key held down and create a new, test library.  Import some photos and test to see if the same problem persists. Does it? (This tells us if the problem is limited to your current library or is more wide spread)

Then try opening your primary library again.

You wrote "Its just the Photos app on this drive (3TB Lacie Porsche - other folders open fine on this drive). "

The Photos Library is on this drive, right, not the Photos.app?

The external drive has a wired connection and is not a network share? A network connection may be causing problems.

Do you have an older backup copy of this library that you could restore?

When I need to rebuild my Photos Library I am usually downloading a fresh copy of the library from iCloud Photos. If your library is syncing with iCloud Photos, you could give this a try.

I woud use file>import, and then select the folders. Make sure the XMP file is in the same folder as the image file.

Don't try to do the whole lot at once though. Photos has a bad habit of aborting an import silently (with no error message) if it encounters a file it can't use. Do the import in chunks so it is not too hard to identify the culprit if one or other folder fails.

Select the photos in smaller groups for import into the new library, not more than thousand photos at once.

Are you planing to create a subfolder structure on export, or really just one large folder called "2018"? I find it useful to use a subfolder scheme ""Moment Name", so all photos taken at the same day and place will be in a folder named according to the capture date and location.

Before I am exporting photos, I am changing the date format in "System Preferences > Language & Regions > Advanced > Dates" to a format yy:mm:dd . Then I can easily sort the subfolders by the date. This help, if the date is missing from the exported images.

When I export with "File > Export > Export unmodified Originals" with the original filename and the Moment name, the exported files are easy to find:

And will appear in subfolders like "Anchorage & Seward, 2013/08/26". Inside the folder they can be sorted by the camera generated original filenames, chronologically. I find the easiest way to save the original metadata and to structure the exported originals or versions.

GLHDDS wrote:

Okay now I’ve started that process. I have folders with a bunch of jpegs but also .xmp and .aae files. How do I build I new library with all these files?

The .XMP files and .AAE files are sidecar files. The .AAE files usually describe the filters or other edits applied on the device that took the photo, and the .XMP files contain titles, captions, capture date and other IPTC metadata. When you reimport the photos with these sidecar files in the same folder into a new Photos Library, photos may be able to restore the some of the metadata you added.

The only good and reliable way is to Export

File -> Export -> Unmodified Original

As the files are renamed on import in v6, you will get quite mess if you try the backdoor