After MacOS Sonoma update, Photos app is unable to open my Photos Library because it's stored in iCloud Drive.

THIS and exactly my point. what is happening here. I need to access photos for my mother's funeral in 2 days and I am 1200 miles from home. The exact purpose of ICLOUD. My hard drive backup, via Time Machine and direct copy are in Texas as well.

exactly and add that small hard drives are the standard.

Now I have my mom's funeral in two days, and cannot get to the photo library. I am 1250 miles from my home, where my backup hard drive and Time Machine are located. Isn't this the purpose of ICLOUD.

I finally was successful at copying a Photos Library file to my hard disk drive and after numerous attempts got Photos to load it and designated it as the System Library. Now the problems are this library does not have all my photos of the previous two weeks - those photos are still "synched" on my iPhone and iPad - and also while Photos has my Albums it does not have any of my many "Shared Albums" which also still are on my iPhone and iPad.

This is absurd. I do lots of stuff with photos and it looks like it's been rubbed from my hard drive and is only available in iCloud!? Tried Time-machine workaround which didn't work. Tried laboriously manually downloading into new folder on desktop but iPhotos won't open it as they are greyed out?! Really basic pain in the arse. Not the first time lost huge amount (music) data after a OS upgrade and getting very very ****** off with spending ages trying figure out something that works for years, suddenly not working. Still not fixed and very very angry.

I still have them on my iPad and iPhone, but it's annoying not to be able to access/ sync on the laptop. I moved the folder to the hard drive....then discovered I could sync them and it would update. I found it by accident, now need to search again as can't remember where it was!!

Please start your own thread. A 5 page thread is sometimes ignored by the folks that can solve the problem. Make a detailed report of *your* problem, don't just link to this thread.

I assume you read the answer and understand the difference between the iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos.

Not true. I used to have my photos library stored on my macbook air local hard drive. During one of the OS updates about 2 years ago it moved the same library to iCloud storage along with all of my other locally stored files. Now, after upgrading to 14.1.1 from 13xxx I have run into the issue of Photos not being able to open my library on iCloud Drive. Currently trying to move 38 GB of photos to my local hard drive.

shanemcx,

Thank you for showing me the step by step instructions. I can't get Step 1 c. Lots of folders, but pictures isn't one of them.

I tried doing a search in Icloud for Photos Library and it came up with Photos Library and under it, it says... Ignored

Then when I try to go to Step 2 I found the new finder window a different way. I did find the pictures file under favorites and I did drag the first one into the 2nd

I really appreciate your help. You are a gem!

Now to see if what I did worked!

I just got back from my condo in another city where I have my old Mac with Ventura on it. Was wonderful being able to open photos, turning them and posting them! NOT UPGRADING THT ONE!!!

Thanks again! I will let you know if it works like it used to.

Thanks,

Marlene

Hi Keith,

I think that there are many on this thread that do not understand the difference between the iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos. I assume that my iPhone is still putting my photos on iCloud Photos and now my Mac is not able to sync with them. I disagree with Richard.Taylor's statements "It cannot be on a network drive. This has always been true." Prior to the installation of Sonoma, my Mac synced with my iPhone just fine, and my photos were NOT resident on my hard drive. I only have a 500 TB hard drive, and I'm using about half of it. I keep most of my records on external hard drives that are backed up in triplicate. One in a fire safe AZ, one in a fire safe MN, and one copy that I keep with me. I'd love to hear a technical explanation of what happened when Sonoma was installed and why I can't set this up the way it was prior to Sonoma.

When I look in my iCloud drive for Pictures all I find is this:

Pictures--Shortcut link

with a 2014 date. When I click on it I get an error message about a program called Crossover.

So where do I find my Photos program?

When I use @shanemcx 's instructions, once I choose Move on the warning dialog, my laptop opens a little window that says, "Preparing to move Photos Library.photoslibrary" and then... nothing happens. Even if I leave that window up for hours, no progress is made.

I've tried restarting my MacBook and redoing the process in its entirety, but the same thing happens.

Any ideas?

Richard, I am sorry but I totally disagree with you. I have been using iCloud to sync my Photos since more than a decade, among my Macs, iPads, iPhones without any issues. In fact, I always had different libraries for every Macintosh computer I have, and all of them are stored on iCloud, each one in a separate folder. I never had any problems with that. When I was talking with Apple support recently, they told me that this is a great way to handle my iCloud Photos libraries separately and safely. Needless to say that all libraries are syncing with Photos without any issue. So, it was weird today when I moved my MacBook Pro to Sonoma to see this message. I will search before doing anything, however, I must say that Apple keeps on surprising us recently with their actions in many cases.

I got the help I needed from the Genius Bar in the Mall of America (MN). My photos are on iCloud Photos, right where I want them. NOT taking up space on my hard drive. There is NO local copy. I was simply instructed to put a shortcut on my favorites, so I can see my photos as long as I have an internet connection, which is virtually ALWAYS. I'm OK with this, but what happened between Ventura and Sonoma? Answers are few, but I had NO issues with my photos syncing and I'm pretty sure I had NO local copy under Ventura. If I didn't change the location, why was I no longer able to sync them with my Mac once Sonoma arrived? Still a mystery that Apple will not own up to. The link got busted for some reason. Perhaps to get folks to purchase computers with larger hard drives, I'm not sure. Someone at Apple knows the answer, but this will not be easy to get.

Thank you so much.

Kinda hard to open photo settings without a library opened. …