Photos will not import files from card or drive

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Photos will not import files from card or drive

A few weeks ago I moved my photos library to an external drive (a Samsung 2tb T9). After a couple of weeks of using it, I felt comfortable deleting the original library from the internal imac drive. This seems to have been a mistake.

Now when I try to download photos from an sd card from my camera, it keeps failing. I select Import from the File menu, the in the import screen I select the photos and click the import button; but it just switches to the imports history (under Utilities in the Photos sidebar) without importing. I tried various things (including selecting different combinations of photos and single images from different locations, and repairing the photos library [which was its own clusterfu*k]) but still can not get it to import anything from an external card or from the internal drive.

I have gotten this error message when attempting to import a single image:

"There was an error attempting to free up disk space for import."

But the photos library on the external drive is less than 500gb and the drive has a 2tb capacity.

Advice?

iMac 24″, macOS 15.3

Posted on Mar 22, 2025 12:43 PM

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Answer 1

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ajg303 Author

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8 points

Apr 9, 2025 12:42 PM in response to Richard.Taylor

Thanks for your response. I've been working on this.

The external drive (Samsung T9 2tb) was formatted as xfat. I have now reformatted it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and copied the photos library over. It now works fine (it connects to my phone, iCloud etc.), and I have set it as the system photo library. The button to enable that is dimmed.

Now it shows the message: This library isn't searchable in Spotlight due to its location.

Spotlight search is nice to have but not essential for me. Is there a way to enable spotlight search for this external photo library?

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Answer 2

Mar 22, 2025 4:42 PM in response to ajg303

ajg303 wrote: A few weeks ago I moved my photos library to an external drive

We first need to know how this drive is formatted. To avoid damaging the Photos Library an external drive must be formatted in either APFS format or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format. 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.

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Answer 3

Apr 9, 2025 2:32 PM in response to ajg303

For some reason, Spotlight doesn't look for pictures inside a Photos Library stored on an external drive. I'm not sure if anyone outside of Apple knows why. It might change sometime. But the search feature in Photos works just fine, and so do Smart Albums. Even though my System Library is on my internal drive, I never use Spotlight to look around in there, anyway.

You may notice a bug that we all hope will get fixed: It seems that being on an external drive seems to interfere with Photos' search for location names that correspond to GPS coordinates. Place names already assigned seem to be OK, but new pictures, even though they have the correct coordinates, may not identify a place as Stonehenge, or whatever. If you see this, you should leave feedback with Apple. It may also be worthwhile to comment on the Spotlight thing.

Make suggestions to Apple here:

Feedback - Photos - Apple

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Answer 4

ajg303 Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 9, 2025 3:19 PM in response to Richard.Taylor

Thanks, Richard! Will test the GPS thing.

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Photos will not import files from card or drive

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