Photos export in original format is just creating empty files

Hi

You are the second person I've seen in the last day or so with exactly this issue. See this thread.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253021830

Do you also use optimise mac storage?

Definitely something odd going on. Can you export to an external drive formatted APFS or MacOS extended? (If you have one).

I'd suggest feeding back to apple as a bug report here:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html

Thanks for posting here! I found this thread when experiencing the exact same issue, but exporting originals to a USB stick. Fortunately, since the stick was empty, I tried reformatting the stick with different filesystems and found that it seems dependent on the format:

FAT32: Zero byte files

ExFAT: Zero byte files

MacOS Extended (CS, J): Full files

Even stranger, when checking the "Export IPTC as XMP" box, the XMP files are 1KB on all formats, even when all the other files (including .aae) are zero bytes.

I'm running Big Sur 11.5.1, and 11.5.2 came out yesterday. I've no idea if it has a fix for this, and unfortunately OS upgrades take over 2 hours for me due to our corporate antivirus (Sophos) slowing all file operations down. But I'll try to do the upgrade this evening and see if it helps. (This is deeply frustrating for me right now, as I need to get these photos over to a Windows machine - hence the need for FAT.)

Your work around for the time being is to export to a folder on your desktop and then drag over to the USB stick using finder.

I will try that. I thought about that solution too.

What worked for me is: try exporting both originals or modified versions. One of them will work in my case.

I also use exFAT on ext drive a + Big Sur 11.5.2.

To continue on this theme, anyone know what sort of data recovery process might be used to get deleted photos from the Photos (local) library file? Just had this happen to me after exporting 2.5 years of photo memories to an external HDD. The process finished without incident, saw the photos were all there, then deleted originals to save space. But of course, the photos were all empty.

Never been a "I'll never buy this brand again" sort of person, but with this and an incident where Apple automatically converted all my voice notes to a crappy level of quality without my consent on software update, I'm turning that direction.

You can have weird glitches for decades, Apple, and that's fine. But you can't mess with people's personal records or force us to use software that corrupts them. Probably going to unload this Macbook Air for a Windows box. At least they still have USB ports, so...bonus.

A way to find the photos in the original form, even if deleted in Photos is to:

Home Folder -> Pictures Folder -> Photos Library.photoslibrary

then right click to "Show Package Contents"

This will give you a list of folders with the originals in it. At this point drag the Originals folder as is to a new drive. holding he option key to make a duplicate.

At this point you should have a copy of the photos on the new drive.

If you do tjat

ccleve wrote:

A way to find the photos in the original form, even if deleted in Photos is to:

Home Folder -> Pictures Folder -> Photos Library.photoslibrary

then right click to "Show Package Contents"

This will give you a list of folders with the originals in it. At this point drag the Originals folder as is to a new drive. holding he option key to make a duplicate.

At this point you should have a copy of the photos on the new drive.

Don't do that except in the most extreme of cases. For a start you lose all your filenames and risk trashing the existing library.

You're right, if you mess with the files it can cause issues. The issues is that they already have "lost" the photos. Making a copy has never disrupted the files making them impossible to open in Photos.

This is the solution I needed. I'm moving all of my photo storage to an ExFat formatted external hard drive, and was running into this 0kb exports issue. After reading this I tried exporting the 'unmodified originals' to another hard drive that happened to be Macintosh Extended, and all the photos exported correctly. I then transferred the photos from the second external drive to the first. Huge pain, won't be using Photos again, I'd rather store them as actual files and edit them in 3rd party software. In-fact, I just bought Lightroom for that reason.

I'm actually a Lightroom user, but just for clarification:

I'd rather store them as actual files

Photos stores your images as "actual" files. It's just that in the default setting those are hidden from user view. This is done to help prevent the inexperienced user mucking up the library.

and edit them in 3rd party software

This is perfectly possible with Photos too. You can send an image from Photos to any pixel editor and get the edit back.

For what it's worth it's fixed in the next Photos and system versions.

Hi

Your work around for the time being is to export to a folder on your desktop and then drag over to the USB stick using finder. This should work.