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Have I really lost my wedding photos and more from the last year?

Excuse my lack of knowledge regarding all of the following.

In the last 6 months, I update the internal drive of my mac to get it back to running at a reasonable speed. I backed up the entire system on an external drive in case things went array, but all went well. Fast forward to a month ago, I finally moved photos from my phone onto the photos application on my mac to make space for my phone before a trip-- it had been a long time since I made this export to my mac so there were a ton of photos, including my wedding photos. Any who, I decided to export again and was going to organize the photos over the last gosh probably 2 years on my mac when I got a popup saying welcome to photos, and it telling me in order to access photos I need to delete incomplete items. It will not let me access any of my photos otherwise. I am very confused why this is happening since I refuse to use icloud, I have not updated my photos app on macbook, and was able to access all of my photos just last month after exporting a ton of photos into the app. Have I really just lost all of my photos that I recently exported onto the photos app? Why would apple randomly decide that these photos are incomplete? I am really freaking out. Thank you for any help.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jun 20, 2021 9:13 PM

Best reply

léonie

Level 10

195,191 points

Posted on Jun 20, 2021 11:38 PM

The message "Delete incomplete items" will only appear, if the Photos Library you are trying to open has been syncing with iCloud Photos and there are a few items, where the original photo is only in iCloud.. Perhaps it has been enabled without you noticing it, when you copied or cloned the library to the external volume.

If a library has incomplete items, you cannot open it in Photos without allowing Photos to delete incomplete items.

I would make a second copy of your Photos Library on an external drive as described here (Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support) and then allow Photos to remove the incomplete items. Perhaps it will only be a few items and all is well. If not, you may be able to use the copy of the library to sync to again with iCloud Photos. Are you very sure, that iCloud Photos has never become turned on on any of your devices? You may not have noticed it, if it became turned on after a system upgrade as a default. Please check the Photos > Preferences > iCloud for your current library.

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Have I really lost my wedding photos and more from the last year?

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