Fixing a Photos library that was moved wrong.

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Fixing a Photos library that was moved wrong.

I was working on an iMac with an infected mailbox running Mojave. The available disk space was less than 100Mb when I was called in to help. In an attempt to get the machine running well enough to back it up I dragged the Photos Library to an external hard drive and deleted the original.

Fast forward through two weeks of ****. I've got the iMac updated to Monterey and all the important data recovered via their last Time Machine backup a month ago. The problem is when I try to move the Photos Library I get an error that says I need to use Migration Assistant. When I run Migration Assistant I don't see any files after they upgraded from High Sierra to Mojave in 2018.

The Time Machine backup were made to a very old, very slow, RAID. To make matters worse, they did it over a Airport network. ( I think ) I understand that Time Machine makes a different type of backup over a network than it does when you use an attached drive? I have tried to run Migration Assistant over the network and it just spins for hours, this is just getting the file information to select. I still haven't been able to leave it long enough to get to the Photos Library.

The question is: Is there anyway to fix a copy of the photos library that was just dragged out of the back up or dragged out of the original system to a drive? Now that we upgraded to Monterey, I can update that dragged library and it opens but some of the photos are greyed out, or whited out.

Other confounding factors. They used the same iCloud account on two separate iMacs and took apples suggestion to "Optimize Photos" on their iCloud. This move co-mingled their Libraries. iMac #1 had about 50,000 photos and very slow internet, like 0.5Mbps upload speed. iMac #2 had about 1.2TB of photos and video, 150,000+ photos and 1,000+ videos and internet upload speeds over 500Mbps. so all that went into iCloud pretty quickly (before I was called in to figure out what happened)..

If I can't fix the dragged Library I guess I'll have to leave Migration Assistant running over night and see if it ever gathers the file information. It just seems like there should be a quicker way.

iMac Pro

Posted on Aug 1, 2022 7:21 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

195,571 points

Aug 1, 2022 9:41 PM in response to PBFTom

Just a side mark on restoring a Photos Library from Time Machine: You can recover single files by dragging them from the Time Machine volume to some folder, but this will not suffice for a Photos Library. It is a package of linked files and databases, and you need to run Time Machine to recover the linked items, either when you set up a new Mac with Migration Assistent, or launch Time Machine and use the "Browse other backups" option. This might be quicker than using setup Assistent.

But anyway - a Time Machine backup does not suffice to restore an optimized library, it will only save the structure of the library, the albums and folders, but not the optimized photos.

If you did not delete any photos and videos from iCloud an all your photos and videos are still in iCloud, Tony's recommendation to recreate the library from iCloud should suffice to get all photos back. But if you deleted photos from another library syncing with the same iCloud, and some photos are now gone from iCloud as well, you may need your older backup that has not been optimized. In that case try to run Time Machine to restore the library to some external drive with enough storage. Hold down the options key while launching Time Machine to bring up the "Browse other backups" option.

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Answer 2

Aug 1, 2022 6:57 PM in response to PBFTom

If they had optimase storage set, then the library you copied did not have all the photos in it. Any (most) that were optimised were stored only in iCloud. So as a backup it is not much use.

Your best bet in this situation is to create a new empty library, and sync that with iCloud. This will populate the new library with everything currently stored in iCloud.

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Fixing a Photos library that was moved wrong.

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