photo repair not working

The repair canon fix all issues. It is very useful, if thumbnails or previews are corrupted, if Photos crashed and left the library in an inconsistent state, or if you opened the library from different user account and the permissions and file ownership need fixing. But the repair tool cannot fix a library corruption caused by keeping the library in an incompatible location or by using third party cleaning apps on the library. As Tony wrote, the repair may need several days to complete, without any visible progress is the library is very large. Make sure, you have plenty of free working storage on the volume with the library and on your system volume.

If your library cannot be repaired at all:

• If your library is an iCloud Photos Library, it is usually much faster to download a fresh copy from iCloud Photos to a new, empty library instead of trying to repair it, because repairing it will cause a very long and tedious new upload to iCloud Photos.
• If your library is not an iCloud Photos Library, restore the last working version from your Time Machine backup. You need always to have a working backup copy of your library, for the worst case scenario, that Photos may not be able to open the library at all, if it should get damaged badly. Since macOS 10.15 we can no longer recover the unmodified originals with the filenames unmodified from the library package as it has been possible with the previous versions of Photos.

Hi

(Edited to add - before we start how large is your library. If it is a large library, and on a compatible volume, it might just take a long time. Leave at least 24 hours without change to the progress before you give up. If none of the solutions below help, try leaving it 48 hours, or up to a week before finally throwing in the towel)

Sorry - I would not recommend that approach just yet. At the very least DO NOT ALTER THE CONTENTS OF YOUR LIBRARY, nor delete it. DO NOT move any files or otherwise change the contents with finder. Do not delete the library. If you want to get the original/masters out, COPY them, don't move them.

You will loose all organisation, keywords etc, all edits, and if you are on Catalina or later, you will also loose all the original filenames, having them replaced with things that look like:

3AE48E7B-3E29-4770-865E-A5B56E4F2020.heic

first we should try to fix the repair issue.

1 - Where is your library stored? In your pictures folder or somewhere else. If on an external volume what is the format. See below about compatible formats for external volumes for photos libraries. To check the format, use CMD-I on the volume.

2 - What version of MacOS do you have? How do you backup your system, and when was the last backup?

3 - ONLY if your library is on your system drive or another compatible volume, try booting into safe mode and try the repair again.

4 - Again - only on a compatible volume, try creating a new user account, copy the library to the pictures folder of that account and try again.

5 - If your library is on an incompatible volume (eg one formatted ExFAT) set up a compatible location, copy the library to that location and try again.

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

It must be formatted APFS or MacOS extended (journaled) (preferred for spinning drives)

It Must not be (or have been) used for time machine. (A time machine drive can be used if re-formatted)

It must have the 'ignore ownership" checkbox ticked.

It should not be on a memory stick, SD or similar.

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

File sharing services such as iCloud Drive, Drop box, Onedrive etc are not compatible with Photos libraries.

It stands to reason that if you want any sort of reasonable performance it should be a fast drive with a fast connection.

See

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

If any of the info in any of the data folders has thrown a wobbler, and the Photos app isn't fixing it, your best (and only) bet at this point is to go into your Home folder, to the Pictures folder and to the Photos Library.. click once on it and then right click (or control click if you've got an apple mouse or just a trackpad) and go to where it says Show Package Content - and into the Library folder you go until you find a folder named Masters (or Originals, if it was an old iPhoto library).

These are all the actual pictures you imported.

Move that Masters folder to your Desktop and go back to the Photos Library folder and throw it in the trash. (Do not empty the trash just yet)

Launch your now empty photos and it should open as if it was new.

Go to the import menu and point it at the Masters folder on your Desktop and let it re-import the photos and rebuild the library.. you will NOT have the pictures sorted into any albums if you did before, so you'll have to rebuild that manually yourself.

Once Photos is done, quit it then relaunch to check that everything's there and then you can move the Masters folder to the trash (or even better, copy it to a flash drive for backup) and empty it.

Good luck!