How long will the Photos library update to take on MacBook Air?

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How long will the Photos library update to take on MacBook Air?

I have an iphoto library of roughly 695GB. It was created in 2018. The pictures and videos are from 2005-2018. It was last opened on an iMac whose OS has not been updated since 2020ish time frame, I am not certain. This is on an external hard drive.

When I open the library on my current MacBook Air 2023 (Sequoia 15.3 OS), I get a prompt that says updating library. It is stuck on 5% for hours.

(1) How do I know it is updating?

(2) What is it actually doing? Is this necessary and can it be bypassed?

(3) Is there a faster way of doing this? - Another Apple program...3rd party software/hardware...copying file to an SSD or my hard drive. using a much more powerful computer with more RAM...opening on the old computer...exporting...etc...

(4) How long should this take?

(5) Why do some people suggest repairing the file? What specifically does this achieve and does it risk corrupting the file?

Thank you

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Posted on Feb 10, 2025 6:29 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 10, 2025 8:33 AM in response to PDP85

PDP85 wrote: … I have an iphoto library of roughly 695GB.

Is it really an iPhoto Library, or is it a Photos Library, iPhoto was discontinued before 2018, but is this leftover? Sequoia will not run an iPhoto Library. The extension on a Photos Library is ".photoslibrary." I believe the extension on an iPhoto Library is ".iphotolibrary" Which one do you have?

This is on an external hard drive.

How is your external drive formatted? To avoid damaging the Photos Library an external drive must be formatted in either APFS format or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. Additionally, the drive can not have had Time Machine on it since it was formatted. There have been so many problems with using incompatible drives that the newest macOSs won't even allow a Library on a non-Mac formatted drive to open, since there is a chance of damaging the Photos database. See this:

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

If this drive is in a an incompatible format, stop running Photos with it immediately! A Photos Library can sit on an incompatible drive, but running it may corrupt the database.

Updating a Library usually takes a few minutes.

I don't think I've seen Repairing a Library take as much as a half-hour.

Get back to us about the hard drive format and the type of library,

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How long will the Photos library update to take on MacBook Air?

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