An unexpected error has occurred

Thank you so much CJAlbertson! This worked! I've had my Photos trapped for an entire year!

In fact, I also had to rename an old iPhotoLibrary.migratedphotolibrary file to iPhotoLibrary.photoslibrary and then the library selection window allowed me to choose the old file. Then it migrated it properly after following your steps. (Hold option.)

It is hard to say, why this is happening.

Is there a crash log, when you press the "report" button? What does the error message say?

Can you launch Photos, when you hold down the alt/options key when launching it and starting it on a new Photos library?

Holding down the alt/options key will bring up a library chooser, so you can select to create a new empty Photos library instead of migrating an old library.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html is the place for feature requests and feedback

I suspected it was the symbolic link on my system as well, but didn't understand the issue at your level. Thanks for the solution, and excellent explanation.

Glad you could solve it.

The message dialog box did not offer more information, just "unexpected error"

Was there no "report" button in the error panel? That usually shows the ful crash log with more specific error messages.

It ties to do this in ~/Pictures. But in my case this is a symbolic link. The Photos apps fails to check if this is a link and tries to create a new directory. This of course fails.

Are you sure, a symlink for the Pictures folder is supported in MacOS X? It is after all a special folder, created by the system. The only special folder that I know of, that can be relocated to another place is the Home folder. There is an option for it in the system Preferences.

I have the same problem, and found this post because I searched on Google "apple photos crash symbolic link" since I'm a Unix user since ages like you 🙂

My Mac partition is on my SSD, while Pictures is on an NTFS partition of a normal hard, so I made the symlink.

Do you have a workaround? The problem is at startup as you know, so even launching the app wih "alt/option" and selecting a new library does not solve the problem.

Thanks!

The Photos Library does not need to be in the Pictures folder, you can keep it on an external drive. I'd move it out of your sym-linked Pictures folder to another folder on the external drive, to take the symlink out of the equation.

The format of your drive may be a problem. Apple recommends to use drives formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled). If your drive has a different format to be able to share your Photos with Windows machines, you will not be able to sync the library with iCloud Photo Library.

By default, your System Photo Library is stored in the Pictures folder on your Mac, but you can move it to another location on your Mac or store it on an external storage device. However, to use iCloud services, the external storage device must be formatted using Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format, also known as HFS+.

https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/?lang=en#/pht211de786

We have seen quite a few posts, where the startup with the big blue "get started" button terminated with this error message, when the Photos library was on a drive, that was not formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled).