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I'm looking to import a photos from OneDrive to the Photos app in Catalina. Some of them import fine while others fail with "unknown error." I'm able to open the files in Preview and everything looks fine on my Windows computer. What should I do to troubleshoot this?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.0
Hi
Often strange permissions errors come when there are permissions problems with the library. This can be caused by storing the library on an incompatible volume.
Where is your library stored? If on an external drive, what is the format. (It needs to be APFS, or MacOS extended, with the ignore ownership checkbox checked)
If this is all OK and/or it is stored on your system drive in the pictures folder, then the next thing I'd try would be to restart your mac in safe mode and try. If that works correctly, restart normally and try again.
Finally if that doesn't help, try a library repair (Hold down CMD and OPT while starting photos)
Hi
Often strange permissions errors come when there are permissions problems with the library. This can be caused by storing the library on an incompatible volume.
Where is your library stored? If on an external drive, what is the format. (It needs to be APFS, or MacOS extended, with the ignore ownership checkbox checked)
If this is all OK and/or it is stored on your system drive in the pictures folder, then the next thing I'd try would be to restart your mac in safe mode and try. If that works correctly, restart normally and try again.
Finally if that doesn't help, try a library repair (Hold down CMD and OPT while starting photos)
Thanks, Tony. That kinda worked. Some of the photos show up in the image preview and others don't. You can see that in the screenshots. I double-clicked the 'blank' files in Finder and received a permissions error. I then did Command-I to look at those permissions and everything looked OK to me. What do you think?
Here's the Import process in Photos.
Here's what it looks like in Finder.
Here's the error message
And the permissions on a the file.
Try copying them first to a folder on your desktop.
Thanks very much for the suggestions, Tony. My library is on the main storage on my MacBook, not external storage. It's also a pretty new box so there would have been little time for corruption to show up in the library.
I believe I found the problem though. It seems that a good number of the photo files were corrupted when they were downloaded from OneDrive. They were fine in the source OneDrive folder but didn't make it down properly. I downloaded a sample folder again and successfully imported all the files. That tells me I need to download good copies of all the files and attempt the importation again.
I'm hoping the Photos app will recognize and skip duplicates so I don't need to deal with them manually.
Photos doesn't work well with network synced folders. I would suggest not trying to import directly from a synced folder, but first copy out the images from the synced folder to a temporary folder (eg on your desktop).
If the files you are importing are exact copies of the files in photos (same name/type/size/image/metadata etc) then they should be recognised as duplicates
"Unknown error" when importing in Photos app.
