Unable to download videos from a Shared Album in Photos

Question

Unable to download videos from a Shared Album in Photos

I'm trying to download videos from a Shared Album. I've tried:

dragging and dropping to a folder in Finder
dragging to my Library
right-clicking the videos and selecting "Import" from the menu
selecting Export > Export unmodified originals from the File menu

All those methods fail with the same error: The operation couldn't be completed. (Cocoa error -1.)

See attached screenshot:

I also tried changing settings under Preferences > iCloud to "Download originals" so that I could find the videos in the Photos Library package, but they are not there either.

Apple makes simple stuff such as downloading videos extremely hard and frustrating. If anyone has any tips or clues on how to get these videos, I'd really appreciate it!

Posted on Oct 9, 2023 12:16 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 10, 2023 3:26 AM in response to léonie

Hi!

There's about 70 GB available on my Mac drive, so probably not that. I'm running macOS Monterrey (12.6.7).
Photos Library is in my Pictures folder in the home directory (not external).
Shared videos have been recorded on an iPhone, they are mp4 files encoded with H.264 and AAC, which I suppose is the standard format for iPhone, so it shouldn't be an issue as well.

So far I have been able to download 2 of the 21 videos. I can also see these 2 inside the Photos Library:

What I find particularly frustrating is how when I drag and drop from Photos to the Finder it starts an "export" job. It should just copy the mp4 file from one location to the other.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

195,025 points

Oct 9, 2023 12:30 PM in response to alvaroantonio

There are several possible reasons for this error message, anything, that can prevent the download of a photo.

The most common reason: lack of local storage on your Mac, so the downloaded photos cannot be saved.You may want to check the amount of local free storage.
Or storing your Photos Library on an incompatible external drive - where issue Photos Library stored?
An incompatible format of the shared videos - which system version do you have installed? And what is the format of the videos?

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Answer 3

Oct 10, 2023 6:34 AM in response to alvaroantonio

Okay, a system update + reboot seemed to solve the problem. Thanks so much for your time anyway!

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Unable to download videos from a Shared Album in Photos

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