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Photos was unable to repair permissions on your library

My wife and I have separate logins to our iMac. This caused us to create two separate iPhoto Libraries as we were uploading photos. I had been waiting for the Photos release to put together a common Library for us to share and be able to load to from our individual accounts.


Both iPhoto libraries were migrated to Photo. I exported all her photos from her library as 'unmodified originals' to her shared folder. Then while in my account I imported those files into my Photo's library. Then I moved my Photo Library to my shared folder. I gave my wife Read/Write permissions on the Library file.


While logged in a my wife I 'Option Clicked' on Photos and selected the shared Library from my Login and got the following error;

"An error occurred while preparing permissions. Photos was unable to repair permissions on your library."


As a test I created a new Library under my wifes Login and put it in her shared folder, and got the same error while trying to access it under my Login.


I ran disk utility and did not see any issues on the drive.


Any thoughts??

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Posted on Apr 15, 2015 11:19 PM

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Posted on Apr 16, 2015 6:24 AM

Just like with iPhoto, you cannot share a library between users in a Shared folder. If two users write to the same library, you get a problem with the ownership of the database files inside the library, since is a package of many files. The Read/Write permissions on the library alone do not suffice.


It will only work, if the shared Photos library is on separate drive or disk partition, set to "Ignore ownership on this volume". See this support document:

iPhoto: Sharing libraries among multiple users

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Question marked as Best reply

Apr 16, 2015 6:24 AM in response to MuggerMD

Just like with iPhoto, you cannot share a library between users in a Shared folder. If two users write to the same library, you get a problem with the ownership of the database files inside the library, since is a package of many files. The Read/Write permissions on the library alone do not suffice.


It will only work, if the shared Photos library is on separate drive or disk partition, set to "Ignore ownership on this volume". See this support document:

iPhoto: Sharing libraries among multiple users

Apr 21, 2015 2:00 PM in response to MuggerMD

I am not sure if I have the same situation as you, but my wife and I are both users on the same Mac and I created a shared user where we put things we have in common like our Photo library (formerly iPhoto library for many years).


When I migrated to Photos with OS X 10.10.3, I found that our "regular" users could not access Photos and we got the same error message.


I was able to get access by editing the "Photos.photoslibrary" file (I needed to turn on "admin" access to do so") and change the permissions for "Everyone" from "Read only" to "Read & write". After changing that setting, I opened up Photos again as my own user, and had to say OK to "repair permissions" which took a few minutes but then it worked.

Photos was unable to repair permissions on your library

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