Mac Photos app freezes after importing iPhone photos

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Mac Photos app freezes after importing iPhone photos

Hello everyone.

I decided to try and free up space on my iPhone by moving all my iPhone pictures to my Mac and then deleting off my phone (not yet deleted from phone). The 50gb of iCloud storage I pay for is also full so iCloud photo syncing has been paused.

I got my lightning cable out and plugged in my iPhone and it imported the 1500+ “new pictures” from my phone. There were already some photos on my Mac from previous imports. This worked successfully.

Just to be sure, I then opened up “image capture” and imported all my photos through there and added them into a folder I called “iPhone backup Jan 26”. I’ve attached a picture of how my “pictures” folder in finder looked after doing this. Notice it’s created a strange file called “photos library photos.library” this wasn’t there previously. This folder also has zero bytes in it and when opened with “show package contents” has nothing in it. Now when I click on the photos app, it fails to open and says that the “photos library toslibrary” won’t open and lists no other library’s to open.

I've started trying to repair the photos app by holding cmd+option whilst clicking on it. So far its been frozen with a colour wheel spinning and nothing happening for 30 mins.

Posted on Feb 24, 2026 2:09 AM

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Answer 1

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Richard.Taylor

Level 6

18,439 points

Feb 24, 2026 8:10 AM in response to finnhill34

The normal name for a Photos Library is

"Photos Library.photoslibrary"

with capitals and dots like that. Since there's not enough room, it looks like

Photos

Library… toslibrary

The Photos Library holds the pictures that the Photos app controls. You might like to see this

Basic Terms about Photos

just to be sure we're meaning the same things with our words.

The Library shouldn't be empty (and you shouldn't mess around inside of the Library package.) Also, the Pictures folder usually has way more stuff in it. Is this brand new?

If you close Photos and then option-click on the Photos icon, you can bring up the Library Chooser:

This should so any Photos Libraries that you have. The one labeled System Photos Library is the main one that other apps can use. The path to each Library is shown below. Most people have only one Library.

You can open a Library from here, or you can go to the location of the Library you want and double click on it to open that Library in Photos. Photos Libraries are usually kept in the Pictures folder, so you can see if that's true for yours.

I'm just guessing that what you need is just to find the right Library, but I'm not sure what's going on. Let us know what you find and if you need more information.

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Mac Photos app freezes after importing iPhone photos

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