External photos not importing on Mac

Hi Richard, ok if I open the photo in preview and export it as a jpeg into the system Pictures folder then it does import into Photos ok. Any thoughts as to how I can batch open and export several thousand photos?

None of that helped although I finally had the gumption to try importing a single photo from the early years and they all do the same thing. Here are the screenshots for one of them. As you are the only person who has engaged with this I'll try a new post with the specific error message as well, but if you can solve this please do!

They are mainly JPG and show fine in Preview. They range in size from 270Kb up to around 8mb. Taken from a mixture of iPhones, DSLRs and a couple of scans.

The only think I can find different is the date.

The external drive is formatted Mac OS extended and the photos are organised into folders named "YYYYMM event" so for example "201710 Holiday" and within those folders there are sometimes sub-folders like "City Centre" or "Aqua Park" or whatever.

As far as I can see October/November 2017 is the cut-off point, photos in folders dated after that point import, photos in folders before that point don't.

No error messages, just Photos appears to be working but nothing comes out the other end. When the folders are selected the photos for import are shown, I can chose to preserve folder structure, click import new photos and then nothing happens. If I try to import again Photos tells me to wait until the import is finished, a few minutes later it then allows me to import again as if the previous import had completed.

One step further, actually if I just copy the offending photos to Pictures and import from there they are fine. So my external drive has photos that import directly off it (all post 2017) and photos that need to copy to Pictures (all pre 2017). I'm guessing some of the file permissions may be messed up, can't think what else it would be - thoughts as to how I could reset them?

The permissions were already set as in your image, with ignore ownership already checked. However it is only some of the folders on the drive that are causing the issue, those with images pre-2017 so it wouldn't be a drive level issue?

However in a moment of clarity I selected the little drop down just above ignore ownership on this volume and used "apply to enclosed items" and it has fixed the issue.

Thank you so much for bearing with me on this and for helping! Fingers crossed it will work when I do the whole lot, but it has worked for 182 photos in 10 folders.

I've done a bit more research, the issue seems to be photos prior to Oct/Nov 2017. Everything after then appears to import, but older photos don't.

I've also tried with the photos library in "my pictures" on my internal drive, doesn't make any difference. I've tried using both the system library and a library that isn't the system library

Hi Old Toad,

It is a system wide problem, but see Richard's suggestion and the outcome!