Original files missing from Photos app

Is there perhaps a problem with your cloud storage? Have you used up all cloud storage you have subscribed to? Then Photos may not be able to download photos from iCloud, until you free cloud storage, so iCloud will work again properly.

If you have photos in your library that have been imported as referenced files, without copying them into your library, you should not be seeing them on your other devices, because referenced files are stored only locally and cannot sync with iCloud Photos to other devices.

You can check, if your library contains referenced images in three ways:

• Create a smart album (File > new smart album) with the rule "Photo is referenced". Is this smart album empty?
• Enable badge overlays: Goto the "View" menu and enable "Metadata > File Type". Referenced photos will be shown with an arrow badge overlay on the icon. are you seeing any arrows?
• Look at the status bar (About the status bar in Photos for macOS - Apple Support) below the Photos tab in the Library view. Does it show items "On this Mac only"?

Hi

Is it possible those photos were edited in a different app (EG iPhoto, or an external editor. Or even aperture)? Sometimes these edits might be incompatible with Photos.

If you take one of those images and revert to original - (from the image menu). Does that fix the problem?

Have you ever use a referenced library rather than copying the photo files into the library package?

Its hard to tell whether the original file is missing or is the library has become corrupted and lost the link with the original (even if that original does exist inside the library package). Reparing the library can help, although clearly not in your case. Do you have an old Time Machine backup that you can restore? I suffered a library corruption sometime ago and managed to recover most of the lost items from a TM backup - although merging the old and new libraries was quite painful.

Have you tried exporting both the original file and edited file, it may be that only one of them is missing.

You can try downloading Power Photos (the free version is fine). If you browse your library within Power Photos and then right click on one of the missing photos it will show you the link to the location of the file within the package. However if the option is greyed out then it means the file location is lost.

Failing that, you can open the Photos package and browse through the folders containing all of the actual photo files but they are not meant for users and so the folder structure and re-naming will make life very difficult.

That’s good news that the original is available. Presumably when you open the edit menu you can see the edit settings you have already made? Try making a small edit adjustment to one of the settings, this should force Photos to save a new edited version.

jqflem wrote:

Thanks for your suggestion, léonie. I tried it and there are no referenced photos in the library. However, the status bar on the bottom says "Restoring from iCloud" with the bar probably 99% of the way to the top. Wonder if that has something to do with it?

Following Russ' suggestion (above), I found that the edited versions of the photos appear to be missing, but not the originals.

Any idea what that might be about?

Thanks

The "Restoring from iCloud" may hang, if items in iCloud are in a file format, that Catalina can no longer read, because the system has no support for some older Legacy codecs or colour sync profiles

If the edited versions are not available, you ma have applied filters, that have been replaced by other filters in newer system versions, or - as Tony suggested - used external editors, that are saving the edited versions in an incompatible format.

You can do the revert on multiple images at once. Just select all the ones you want to revert and go to the image menu and select "revert to original"

It might help to gather the problematic ones into an album first, then they can all be selected with CMD-a