Restoring Photos after Mac update to Sonoma 14.4

Hold it-- is Time Machine on the same volume as the Photos Library? It turns out that they don't work well together, and can't be on the same volume.

If that's not the problem, you should try these things:

• Restart the computer (of course)
• Re-start in Safe Mode. This bypasses certain potentially disruptive processes. Safe Mode is different for different computers, so see this: 

           Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support 

• Make a new user and see if the same problem recurs with it
• Use another library if you have one, or make a small test Library with a few pictures in it and see if that works OK

The idea is to find out if the problem is with the Library, with your account, or with caches and login items, and stuff like that. One of these steps may fix the problem, but their failure to work is also diagnostic.

How is your hard drive formatted? Is it formatted for Mac in APSF or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) ? If not, then Photos Library is not supported. Do you have a backup? Do you use iCloud Photos? Did you update from Ventura?

Warning!!! Don't let Photos update your library especially if you have entrusted it with lots photos! I had 65,000 photos, now I have 58,000 after an "automatic recovery" of my Library. Photos has a serious bug that trashes items once the 64,000 file limit has been reached - in the new Photos database structure. Any photos added or updated after that limit will be lost. The file structure (found in "Show Package Contents") has been changed to a system that renames all of your original files to some ridiculously encoded name and places them in folders labeled in hexadecimal numerics from 1 to F. Once each folder is filled with up to approximately 4000 files, that's it, no further files are written. The result is that looks like in the app is that all newer photos from a particular date are lost, and yes they are lost. Forever, unless you have an untouched Photos Library backup. This means that you can still recover any un-renamed files from the "originals" folder which is not populated with file names like 4C48659C-FAF5-4117-B7DE-CBEO... .jpg, they should look like IMG5634.jpg. 

I tried to recover files from the "originals" folder only to find that anything after November 2022 was lost. Photos automatically threw the rest out because the file structure for the database was exceeded for the files to be written to disk. It took 2 days and 23 hours to re-import the files into a new Photos library that resulted in the same loss of files - because they had already be deleted by Apple programming. Then I looked at the how horrid Apple's Photos database design was...

My external drive is formatted as APFS and Photos has been running with this Library without issue since the Library was transferred to this drive in December of 2023.

However, on Monday, March 18 when I opened Photos, it went right to "Restoring Library" with no chance to exit. It took a couple of hours to "restore" and then opened showing only images and videos up to November of 2022. There is now a pattern of file sizes in the "originals" folder. None of the files are newer than November.

So I am thinking this only occurs when "restoring" the files, or rebuilding, of the library where you have exceeded roughly 64,000 files. I was just short of 66,000 images and 1837 videos in my library when this happened.

They were all moved into the Photos Library bundle and not external links. My backup library suffered the same fate when I switched over to it from Photos. The only thing I can think of is that the "restore" process somehow is able to append images properly above 4000, but screws up royally when it rebuilds the database.

This has been around for a while. Someone has posted here that they had lost all files after September of 2021. I don't think they ever figured it out.

But shouldn't all of the "originals" still be available even after rebuilding?

My library is currently holding 67 266 photos and 652 videos, none are missing.

So I cannot confirm that the 64000 files limit matters. There must have been a different reason for the lost photos after your library upgrade.

In each of the 16 subfolders of "originals" are more than 4000 items.

Have you been keeping your Photos Library on volume with a file system format that is limiting the number of files in folder to 4000?