Photos on Mac hangs while exporting

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Level 1

16 points

Photos on Mac hangs while exporting

Hi all,

I have difficulties in exporting my Cloud-photos via Mac Photos to an external storage as a back-up. (I have 70.000+ pictures including 1500+ videos....)

I open Photos, select all in my media and then try to export.

The export simply just stops working after about 57%, just under 40.000 pictures. I have no idea why, I get no error message, it's just that nothing happens. I need to force-quit Photos to restart (but force quit does not say "Photos is not reacting").

An alternative could be to try an export from Safari unter icloud.com, however you can only select and download 999 at a time, so I would need to take action 70+ times.

Any ideas why this is the case or is there another workaround someone could recommend?

Many thanks!

MacBook Air (2020 or later)

Posted on Mar 20, 2022 9:35 AM

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Answer 1

AnnieL2

Community Specialist

Mar 21, 2022 10:34 AM in response to man-ngai

Salutations man-ngai,

What we’d recommend is working to begin isolating the issue.

Some ways to do that -

If your external storage is connected to an external hub, connect it directly to your Mac.
Try another external drive.
Export 1/2 of your Photos library at a time and see if the export hangs.
You could try booting to safe mode and attempting the export there if you’re able to connect with your external drive while in safe mode. How to use safe mode on your Mac

Thanks.

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Answer 2

Apr 2, 2022 6:04 AM in response to man-ngai

Hi man-ngai,

the issue happened to me as well when I tried to export to NAS via SMB. Connecting via AFP solved the problem. Perhaps this is the solution with minimal effort to you - as long as AFP is still supported.

Best wishes!

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Answer 3

Apr 3, 2022 5:52 AM in response to man-ngai

Hi man-ngai,

sorry for having misunderstood your problem. In my case, export via SMB hangs at 2% of a relatively fresh and small (2.5 GB) library, and export via UaSB works. Probably your issue has a different cause than mine.

But, with your hanging at 57% in mind, even if I am thinking in a too simplistic way again: if you try to export the first half of your library at one time, and afterwards the second half, would that work? (Maybe splitting in thirds or quarters is more feasible while testing the procedure.)

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Answer 4

man-ngai Author

Level 1

16 points

Apr 8, 2022 11:10 PM in response to man-ngai

Quick update after another 3 weeks of trying: it simply does not work yet... I have tried to split the number of pictures and videos to several albums of between 20.000-35.000 individual pics/videos, but I simply get an error after hours stating "unknown error 1050". And the point of the halt varies: sometimes after 1.000 pictures, sometimes after over 10.000 pictures.

I have also tried rebuilding my photos album. To no avail.

So now I am down to trying to reduce the number of pictures to under 5.000 per album. Let's see how that goes...

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Answer 5

man-ngai Author

Level 1

16 points

Mar 22, 2022 11:48 AM in response to AnnieL2

Many thanks Annie, I will give option 3&4 a go over the weekend…. Takes up a lot of time, so nothing for the evening after work.

There still is no option to download more than 999 files from the Cloud-webpage, correct?

thank you

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Answer 6

man-ngai Author

Level 1

16 points

Apr 2, 2022 6:19 AM in response to mcbruno59

Hi Mcbruno

thank you - but I am conmnecting the harddrive directly to my Mac via USB-C connection...

I will retry this with my new Mac mini in the next few days and see what happens. Very frusting, trying this over and over for 3 months now.

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Answer 7

man-ngai Author

Level 1

16 points

Apr 3, 2022 6:15 AM in response to mcbruno59

... No problem :-)

I am currently repairing my Photos-Library and I will try for the 20th time later.... if that doesn't work, I will probably need to split up the years and try incrementally.

Sad that one cannot download more than 999 pictures/videos at once via the web-Page

Keep you posted

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Answer 8

ryane77

Community Specialist

Mar 22, 2022 11:51 AM in response to man-ngai

man-ngai,

You are correct about downloading files from the iCloud website. Let us know how it goes when you try those other approaches.

Best wishes.

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Photos on Mac hangs while exporting

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