Photos not importing

You revived the thread, not him. He added additional information about drives and drive formats - important information too, and those clarifications are both useful and valuable. And no, those replies are not AI created responses. We've seen plenty of those on here and they are far more obvious.

But more importantly, why even make that post? Why be snide about another contributor? Why not stick around and be helpful to others? Wouldn't that be a better use of your time...

It sounds like you've read up on stuff like external drives!

How many pictures are in this folder? You may be running into memory issues. What happens if you import only 50 pictures? We know Photos doesn't do well with many hundreds at a time.

Have you tried creating a new Library, maybe even on your external drive, and importing to the new one? You can transfer them later if it works.

If you can't import even small batches, then try starting in Safe Mode (different for different computers) This bypasses certain potentially disruptive processes.

           Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support 

One of these steps may fix the problem, but their failure to work is also diagnostic.

FYI for anyone reading this thread...I had same problem with lib on external USB drive

and it suddenly starts importing without error but no new items in Photos.

It turned out to be that drive accidentally was disconnected and reconnected, but it apparently was left in some sort of read-only mode.

The fix was to unmount the drive then remount it...imports worked fine again after that.

BTW, my drive is Mac OS Extended so no APFS required (as some people have said)...at least not on my Big Sur.

Mac OS Extended and APFS both work on external drives. APFS is faster on solid state drives; Mac OS Extended is better on mechanical drives.

Macs warn about prematurely disconnecting external drives, though that only occasionally causes troubles. Photos, especially, does lots of background processing, so it may be doing something significant even when you don't think it's busy. Unmounting and remounting is the hard drive equivalent of turning it off and on again. Glad it worked!

Are these chatGPT generated "answers" from 6700+ points Richard Taylor?

There are lots of wordy factoids included that don't really relate to the question or the other replies directly.

(i.e. just like you see generated from LLMs)

They also seem automated to always generate "the last word" on otherwise dormant threads.

Yes, I revived it by adding pertinent info on the root cause and solution of the same problem on my system.

So, I was helpful to others by providing a solution to the actual question and

without adding factoids not germane to a fix nor verbal fluff like "It sounds like you've read up on stuff like external drives!"

My comments about the LLM-like text were prompted by its immediate response to this thread (with no new info pertinent to the question) after no response for 5 months. If that new info was so important, why wasn't it added last summer? That and all the filler replies throughout the history of this thread to always get the last word (like a bot was doing it).

It smells like reply-bots to apparently get lots of points, just like all the LLM-generated spam on google.

Real people ask and answer real questions only when needed which is why they have only 4 points or 17.

They don't live here to get 162K points.

We would all rather have a few quality/specific answers rather than tons of filler content motivated by a point scheme that apparently rewards quantity over quality. Getting the "best reply" because it is the least bad in the first few days is no real indicator of quality, any more than a bad science youtube video is quality just because it has a lot of views.

Your entire second post was hardly germane to the topic and entirely composed of verbal fluff. Richard's response was hardly an immediate response, being posted several hours later, and perhaps if you knew how the forum worked you'd know that it can be set up to tell you that posts have been added in threads you have participated in. And while you may not consider the information in Richard's post germane to you, you're not the only person reading this thread, and you don't get to decide what may or may not be posted.

If you think people responding "smells like reply-bots to apparently get lots of points", then it's pretty obvious that you've no idea of the actual, tangible benefits that accrue to regular contributors. You'd be amazed. I'm impressed that you know what "real people" do, though I would love to know your source, and equally I would love to know how you know what "what we all rather have". But enough of this verbal fluff that you so readily accuse others of...

That's great! Glad it worked out!

Thanks, Yer_Man. I'm still trying to figure out to whom, exactly, saying that I sound like Artificial intelligence is an insult.

The question is are you real artificial intelligence or the fake kind?