photo library lost

12/11/21

I mentioned to my son that my computer was slow.  He said I had too many items on my desktop and that I should delete anything I didn’t need or put them in a folder to get them off of the desktop.

There was a folder on my desktop called Photos Library.photoslibrary.  I looked to see how big the file was and it was only 106,496 bytes so I was sure it was not my photo library since I had many gb of photos in my library so I deleted it.  After deleting it, I could no longer access my photo library from the mac photo app.  I went into my trash and dragged the file back to my desktop.  I have not been able to use my photo app since.

I looked at ALL of my backups on Time Machine and all of the photo libraries had the same size as the one on my desktop.  I tried restoring the Time Machine back up of photo library to my desktop.  Didn’t work.

I tried moving the file to the pictures folder, it did not work.

I tried making a test library to see if the app was working, and I was able to do that.  

I went to icloud hoping to retrieve my library but all it did was copy 848 photos that must have been stored in the cloud (i did not use icloud since I was using Time Machine for backing up)  

I opened my photo app holding down the option key and tried to access each of the libraries that came up and got the message “photos.Photolibrary could not be recognized”.  The only file it could recognize was the “test” library I had just created.

I tried to find my photos on my mac by searching for jpegs in both finder and spotlight.  All it came up with was the photos I knew I had, not the thousands that should be stored on my HD.

I made sure my computer software was up to date.  I installed Monterey on 1/10/22.

I don’t know what else to do.