Problem: a few photos won't import into Photos on new mac mini

Question

Level 1

5 points

Problem: a few photos won't import into Photos on new mac mini

Today I copied five .jpg photos (which came originally from my iphone but had been saved to my old pc) to my new mac desktop (which shows thumbnails of the photos), and which I can view without issue on any of my other apple and pc devices - not to mention can be viewed without issue in Preview on this same new make. Unfortunately, those five .jpgs refuse to be imported into Photos. Photos continually gives the error message: "Cannot Import Item. Reason: Unknown". I have imported thousands of other photos on previous days and today without issue, some taken at the exact same time as these problematic photos.

Anyone know why this might be the case and how to fix it?

Mac mini, 12.0

Posted on Jan 6, 2022 5:22 PM

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Answer 1

PRP_53

Level 10

91,153 points

Jan 7, 2022 2:38 AM in response to BLSPro

Is the user profile and details accurate Mac mini, 12.0 ?

If yes, the is a brand new Mac mini and needs to be updated to current version of Monterey 12.1 released Dec 13, 2021 This update bring bug fixes and may or may not be related to the Photo Import issue.

Suggest doing A Time Machine Backup is very useful and can be used to Revert to Previous Working macOS before attempting the update.

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Answer 2

Jan 7, 2022 6:33 AM in response to BLSPro

As a workaround, use Preview to export the problem images. If the images are encoded in HEIC, try exporting them in JPG or PNG. Finally, try imported the exported versions into Photos.

You may want to use Jeffrey's image Metadata Viewer, to investigate a possible source of the problem (compare a problem image to one that imports into Photos).

- Pie Lover