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User profile for user: Morris Zwick
Morris Zwick Author
User level: Level 1
6 points

Cannot Upload or Export Photos

I am running MacOS 12.1 and Photos 7.0 on a 2017 MacBook Pro.


I have 13,900+ photos in iCloud, and these all sync fine between my iPhone, my MacBook Pro, and Photos on the web in iCloud. I have tons of empty space on my iCloud drive.


However, I have about 498 photos on my MacBook Pro that are unable to upload (I created a Smart Album to find them all). Originally, this was more like 1,000, but in half the cases, they were duplicate photos and deleting them in my main library took care of the problem. I have Photos and videos that date back to my iPhone 4 as I could tell as part of the process of removing duplicates. However the remaining 498 for some reason won't upload, and while some I could do without, many are ones I really don't want to lose.


I tried all of the things recommended online:

  1. Rebuild the library by starting with Option-Command (several times)
  2. Uncheck "Photos" in Preferences for iCloud, waiting, and then rechecking (several times)
  3. Logging out of iCloud and logging back in


None of those things fixed the problem. I initially tried to "Export Originals", but that didn't work (no files exported). I tried exporting random photos to see if doing all of them at once was a problem, but still none exported. The idea of course was to export and reimport, so that didn't work.


I opened the package contents of Photos. Since I have had Macs dating back prior to even Lion, there were all sorts of legacy and migration files there. One thing I read online was to look at the "Masters" file, but on my computer it says "Masters.legacy" and has precisely one photo in it.


The image files MUST be somewhere on my Mac since the photos display in thumbnails, can be expanded, etc. but I tried search the entire Mac for the file names from Get Info, and even searching files to see if they contained text strings in Get Info to no avail.


These files are also apparently inhibiting Photos from running some background processes like facial recognition.


If I could just find the source files on my Mac I could try to re-import them. But I have no clue where they are.


Any ideas would be appreciated.


Thanks!

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Dec 19, 2021 2:21 PM

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3 replies
User profile for user: ryane77
ryane77
User level: Community Specialist

Dec 20, 2021 1:35 PM in response to Morris Zwick

Hi there Morris Zwick,


Welcome to the Apple Support Communities. As we understand it, you have a number of photos that have yet to upload to iCloud, and you've done some looking into this already. We'd like to see how we can further assist.


To double-check, do you have sufficient storage available in iCloud? Check your iCloud storage online or on any device


If so, it might be worth trying to boot your Mac into safe mode to rule out a few potential software issues. Here's How to use safe mode on your Mac. Let us know if booting up into safe mode makes a difference, or if the issue persists there as well.


Kind regards.

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User profile for user: Morris Zwick
Morris Zwick Author
User level: Level 1
6 points

Dec 20, 2021 3:31 PM in response to ryane77

I have plenty of iCloud storage space (1.7 TB free).


I booted in safe mode, although was not really sure what to do when I got there. The "Unable to Upload" smart library disappeared, but then again iCloud wasn't connected because I was in Safe Mode. I did try to rebuild my Photos library (Option-Command), but once I booted back up normally I was in the same place as before. The 497 photos are back in "Unable to Upload" and I can't export the originals to a folder.

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Cannot Upload or Export Photos

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