Photos behaviour with copied Photos library

I think I had about the same problem and actually managed to fix it. This is my story:

1) My Macbook had to go in for some hardware repair so I copied the entire disk to an external drive (using disk utility on the recovery partition). This allowed me to boot my original El Capitan install on any Mac while my Macbook was away).

2) Photos (with iCloud Photo Library enabled) worked as normal when booting from the external drive.

3) When i retrieved my original Macbook it had a fresh install of El Capitan, this was to be expected and a nice moment to start with a fresh system. No biggie because I still had the complete backup of my old system.

4) I copied the content of the Pictures folder (including the Photos Library) to the new system. Started Photos (for the first time) and got the dreaded message “This library contains items that need to download from iCloud photo library", letting me choose between deleting or quitting.

5) <Lots of swearing and searching on the inter webs happened here>

6) I chose the Quit option, renamed my Photos Library file. Started Photos again, created a new library, immediately disabled all iCloud and syncing stuff (it did manage to download about 35 photos or so). Quit Photos as normal.

7) I delete the new Photos Library file from my Pictures folder, renamed my old Photos Library File to the original name. Started Photos again and without any complaining it opened my original Photos Library with all 18k+ photos, Face thumbnails and everything.

I don’t know if this was just a lucky shot, or that by creating a new Photos Library and deleting it some stuff got kicked in the right place for Photos. But everything is working great again, I didn’t have to download my entire iCloud Photos library again and I didn’t lose any photos or meta data.

The problem I have is that I cannot "Download Originals to this Mac" because I do not have enough space. Seems like I would be unable to fully restore my library (including tags, etc.) through both my Time Machine backup plus the backup I made of my photos from the cloud (using "Export" in the Photos application). Do you have any advice on how I could make a reliable (and fully restorable) backup under these conditions of not having adequate space to keep the original photo content on my Mac if I either switch systems or loose iCloud data?

This is a very important question and comment.

(1) The message in the screenshot below is incomprehensible and unacceptable when dealing with someone's entire photo library.

(2) If restoring a Photo Library file from a backup or moving it to another Mac forces an entire re-download of 120 GB of Photos, that is also unacceptable.

(If that strategy was forced by the hard link design decision, than that was a bad design decision.)

(3) Creating a new library as stapes13 did cannot be a generally useful approach, since all projects including books and slideshows would be lost, since iCloud Photo Library does not contain those and they live solely on your Mac. (A fundamental rule of software design is that no user data OR work is intentionally lost.)

(4) Any type of backup (Carbon Copy Cloner) should work, not just Time Capsule. Otherwise the Photos software design is too fragile and too finicky.

(5) "Restoring from backup" seems like a pretty important use case to have designed for and tested intensively before releasing the Photos software.

This really makes me angry. If I had thoughts of replacing the Photos app before, this is cementing the idea. Apple continually makes these terrible decisions alienating their loyal customers. Please post some kind of a fix to this problem.

This is frustrating. Been dealing with this anytime I have transferred my photo library from system to system. I always have to re-sync all 8,000+ photos. I would just delete the library each time and let it pull down from iCloud each time as that's faster than trying to upload all 8,000+ over and over, however I've labeled several thousand photos manually with faces and location information. That information doesn't store up into iCloud, it only lives within the Photos Library itself. Super frustrating!!! 😠

mattverg has highlighted a key point. Perhaps at the crux of user frustration with Photos is Apple's design decision to back up only "some" of the curation and metadata to the iCloud Photo Library, but not all.

First of all, this design in combination with the name iCloud Photo Library leads to a false premise: that your photos and their organization (curation, metadata, projects, books, slideshows, etc) are in the cloud.

Second, I believe the slow comparison times may be because the library on your mac and the library in the cloud are not exactly the same in a few ways: missing organization and new photos added since last comparison. This ambiguity may have led developers to a non-optimal comparison technique.

My advice: backup your mac-based library often, preserving many copies AND defer spending significant time on curation, metadata, faces, locations so on for the time being. You may even want to do without iCloud Photo Library for awhile and sync your iPhone and Mac in more traditional ways. Photos could be really good if the problem described was truly understood in Cupertino and fixed. Not rocket science, so likely very possible if we have the patience to wait and the discipline to protect ourselves and our work until the fix comes.

One more point. I went and bought a 2 TB disk for Photos backups. I dug up backups of my iPhotos library from before the move to Photos and copied those to the new disk. I also copy my Photos library with a dated title to the new disk every 2 weeks or so. I think having many, many time-stamped backups is very valuable until Apple has removed the major flaws in Photos in the context of real user workflows.

Same problem for me. I had an issue ever since upgrading to El Capitan. Essentially, my 2014 MBA would completely kill my WIFI periodically. The solution was to create a new user account (believe it or not, the Apple Tech and I tried everything). So I deleted my old account, saving the home folder, created the user, and moved over the files over avoiding moving ~/Library. Everything has been great but Photos which showed this message. I followed steps 5, 6 & 7 and all of my photo data is good.

Sidenote...

I agree with the commenters above though: some of the Photos data should be external or exportable from the Photos Library. I use Photos because it simplifies my photo management across devices, but I miss the editing power I had with Aperture. I'll never understand how Apple chose to leave such great products in the dust. I say that Apple should make Aperture open source with a limited license that allows developers to add iCloud/Photos Library support.

I'm having the same problem. I don't even know what the message means or what items i would be deleting (one, two or two thousand photos?) by pressing the button on the left.

Tried to download iPhoto to re-open my library, but it's not available.

Being a virtual monopoly is ruining Apple. It's been dumbed down.

I was worried about having the same issue. I'll try this out and post the results as well!

By chance, does anyone know if a similar situation could happen for someone who just has Photo Stream turned on?

Kudos to perryfromrotterdam (fellow city-zen!) for his useful hack. I have twelve old libraries that I copied to my NAS and I was able to open every one using the renaming trick (creating a new (empty) library with the old name, then deleting it and putting the name back on the old library).

It's terrible that Apple has a software bug/glitch/feature that keeps you from using multiple Photos libraries on a drive of your own choice. I'd almost switch back to just folders of photos that I can browse using quicklook and icons… just to be sure I can access everything. For now this workaround will do. Thanks!

Yep, that is the solution. You can even choose "not now" in the initial screen and photos will just open with an empty library. close, rename and you're don. Thanks!

Related question: Is there any reliable strategy for backing up your photo library and photos (on your Mac plus those in iCloud) to fully restore your photos, including the label data?