Issues copying Photos Library to external drive

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Issues copying Photos Library to external drive

I currently have my Photos Library parked on an APFS formatted external HDD drive. I want to copy and paste that library onto a newer, APFS formatted external SSD drive. The destination external SSD has been formatted twice.

Each time I paste the Photos Library onto the new drive, it stops part way through (somewhere between 20 and 60 g) and gives me this message:

"The operation can't be completed because an item with the

name Photos Library already exists".

I've tried this 5-6 times; both by copying and pasting, and by merely dragging and dropping the Photos Library from the existing drive to the newer external SSD, with the same result.

Any ideas to resolve this? Should I rename the Photos Library on the old drive? Should I be using the export function instead?

Thanks for any advice.

Using new Mac Studio with latest OS

Posted on May 16, 2022 12:33 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

olyduck Author

Level 1

41 points

May 16, 2022 10:08 PM in response to TonyCollinet

I finally solved the problem. I created a new folder in the destination drive and then copied the Photos Library to that new folder. Apparently that precluded the duplicate file name issue somehow. And, it worked even though the destination drive was APFS case sensitive and encrypted. Go figure. Anyway, thanks everyone for the suggestions.

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Answer 2

Yer_Man

Level 10

163,788 points

May 16, 2022 1:41 PM in response to olyduck

This is most usually seen when trying to copy to an inappropriately formatted drive, but as this is not the case it could be caused by a glitchy file permission or something similar. Workaround: use a back up application to copy the library over - any that maintains the same format for the library will do (but that excludes Time Machine). You might even be able to do it with a trial version of apps like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. The advantage if this method is that the back up app will take care of those sticky permissions if that's the issue.

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Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

197,279 points

May 17, 2022 3:19 AM in response to olyduck

It is risky, if the drive has a case-sensitive format. This can prevent images and videos from opening correctly, if they are using a container format like MOV or HEIF. When I tested with a Photos Library on a case-sensitive drive, most of my iPhone videos would not play - with the error message, that the video resource could not be found.

It would be much safer to move your Photos Library to a volume with a file system format that is not case-sensitive.

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Answer 4

May 16, 2022 5:11 PM in response to Yer_Man

The only other thing worth checking is that you don't have case sensitivity selected in the format on either the source or destination drives.

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Answer 5

olyduck Author

Level 1

41 points

May 17, 2022 4:26 PM in response to léonie

Thanks for the tip. Maybe I''m lucky.....both my HEIF and MOV files open and play okay on my case-sensitive external drive.

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Issues copying Photos Library to external drive

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