Photos can't import iPhoto library from external drive

The external drive has probably the wrong file system or is not locally mounted. To be able to open migrate the iPhoto library to Photos it needs to be on a volume formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled) and directly mounted - just like described here for Aperture:

Format external drives to Mac OS Extended before using with Aperture

Which version of iPhoto created the library? If it was iPhoto 7.1.2 or earlier, you need first to upgrade the library using iPhoto library upgrader.

See: iPhoto '11: About the Library Upgrader

Now I find that Photos is incapable of opening the iPhoto library on the external drive.

But what exactly happens when you try to open the library in Photos? Usually you should be able to drag the iPhoto Library directly onto the Photos icon in the Dock.

It helps, if the "Ignore ownership on this volume" flag is set on the external drive. Do you have this flag enabled? You can set it in the Info panel.

• Select the external drive in the Finder and press the key combination ⌘I for "File > Get Info".
• In the Info panel open the last section with "Sharing & Permissions".
• Click the padlock icon and enter the password. Then enable the Ignore Ownership flag.

You NEVER Import a library - you open it -

But what exactly happens when you try to open the library in Photos? Usually you should be able to drag the iPhoto Library directly onto the Photos icon in the Dock.

Or hold down the option key while launching Photos and select the iphoto library to open from the resulting window

LN

léonie wrote:

The external drive has probably the wrong file system or is not locally mounted. To be able to open migrate the iPhoto library to Photos it needs to be on a volume formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled) and directly mounted - just like described here for Aperture ...

FWIW, I have tested networked drives with Photos & encountered no problems. As long as they are formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled) & set as the System Photo Library, they even work with iCloud services. I can find nothing anywhere in Apple's literature saying the drive must be directly connected, only that they be mountable & mounted. This condition is easily met by, for example, an external MacOS Extended (Journaled) drive connected to a Time Capsule or Airport Extreme Base Station.

The main downsides to this are Apple's TC & AEBS models support only USB 2 external drive connections so access is somewhat slower than with an internal drive or a locally connected USB 3 one, & of course that the drive must be available on the network when launching Photos. For these reasons, I do not recommend using a networked drive as a location for a Photos Library. My point here is only that there is nothing in Apple's documentation saying the volume must be directly connected, & that it does work.

As long as they are formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled) & set as the System Photo Library, they even work with iCloud services. I can find nothing anywhere in Apple's literature saying the drive must be directly connected, only that they be mountable & mounted.

But can you open and migrate an iPhoto Library on the network drive to Photos?

I did several tests:

• I moved a test library to my Time Machine drive and opened it in Photos. Photos did not create the migrated library on the Time Machine Drive but on the internal system drive. There was no way to get it to write the library onto the Time Machine volume.
• I could not migrate any iPhoto library to Photos, while the library was on the SMB servers of our university network. I could not open the libraries there for migration at all.
• I moved three small Photos library to the SMB server (after they has been successfully migrated from iPhoto to Photos), it worked for some time. When I opened the libraries from a second Mac, the second Mac started to repair the libraries and failed. I never could use the libraries again from any Mac.

This passage in the Photos Help is intriguing: https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/?lang=en#/pht211de786

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+.

You can move a library to an external with a different formatting, but it does not say that you can migrate an iPhoto Library to Photos, while it is on a drive with a different formatting For unified iPhoto and Aperture Libraries have been several warnings by Apple, that the libraries need to be on a locally mounted MacOS Extended volume or we'd be risking data loss and poor performance. And the Photos Help does not mention network drives at all.

However, if the drive has some third party software installed, that prevents us from setting the "ignore ownership on this volume" flag, it will not be save to use the library on this volume from more than one mac, and we'd continually be forced to repair the permissions on the library - if we succeed to repair the permissions and ownership at all.

léonie wrote:

I did several tests:

I moved a test library to my Time Machine drive and opened it in Photos. Photos did not create the migrated library on the Time Machine Drive but on the internal system drive. There was no way to get it to write the library onto the Time Machine volume

I'm not sure what you mean by Time Machine drive. Is it an external drive connected to an Apple Time Capsule or an AEBS via their USB port or something else? Is it a volume used as a Time Machine backup? (If so, ownership can't be ignored -- in fact, only system has write privileges to a TM volume.)

I did not do any tests with drives connected to a SMB server, only ones connected to my Time Capsule via USB & its internal drive (which is used as a TM backup), so the network connection in every case was via AFP (afpovertcp). The externals were formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled). The format of the internal is simply "AppleShare" according to Finder's Get Info & its Sparse Disk Image Bundle backups mount as Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled).

The only test I did on the internal drive was to create a new Photos library on it, using the "Create New..." option available when launching Photos with the option key held down. This created a Photos Library at the same level of the drive as the backup disk images. I did not do any testing with it other than importing some photos & videos exported from my existing iPhoto & Photo libraries on my iMac's internal drive & noting that this worked fine, including importing any metadata embedded in those files. After I verified that much, I quit Photos & deleted that library since I want to keep all the TC's internal drive's space devoted to Time Machine backups.

I did more extensive tests on the external drives connected to the TC via USB. Initially, I just used the same "Create New" procedure & tested in the same way as with the internal, plus temporarily designating one of these Photos Libraries as the System Photo Library so I could test iCloud sharing (which worked fine). But after reading your last reply, I created a test iPhoto Library on an external USB connected one & had Photos open that. It created the migrated Photos Library on that drive, not on the internal iMac drive, so that works as expected as well.

This is the extent of my testing. As I said, I don't recommend using a networked drive as a location for a Photos Library. I do not have any idea if it will work at all unless the network connection protocol is AFP, or how well it would work if the networked volume is not formatted as MacOS Extended (Journaled). But my intent was only to see if it is actually true that only directly connected drives can be used as a location for a Photos Library, & that an iPhoto Library must be on a directly connected drive for the migrated Photos Library to automatically be installed on that same drive.

My tests show that this is not completely true. Moreover, there is nothing in Apple's documentation for Photos that says a directly connected drive is required, only that (as you quoted) the "external storage device" must be formatted using Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format to use iCloud services. It is therefore not accurate to say -- without qualification -- that a "directly connected drive" is needed. While that is clearly the best way to go, it is not a requirement imposed by Apple.

I'm not sure what you mean by Time Machine drive. Is it an external drive connected to an Apple Time Capsule or an AEBS via their USB port or something else? Is it a volume used as a Time Machine backup? (If so, ownership can't be ignored -- in fact, only system has write privileges to a TM volume.)

I meant a drive used by Time Machine cannot be used to host a Photos Library, because the the ignore ownership flag cannot be set, or any remotely mounted drive with software installed that is preventing to set this flag.

But again, while I could open Photos libraries on remotely mounted volumes I could not migrate them on these volumes.

While that is clearly the best way to go, it is not a requirement imposed by Apple.

It is hard to say, what the requirements of Apple are. Apple has a bad track record of stating the full requirements.

Nowhere in the Photos Help does Apple describe the full list of supported file formats for Photos for example.

We have to experiment to find out which formats are supported.

Compare to the iPhoto Help. Apple did never state in the iPhoto Help which volumes can be used to host an iPhoto Library. The restrictions for iPhoto and Aperture libraries (locally mounted, MacOS Extended) are only described in hard to find support documents. After many years of photo libraries being restricted to locally mounted, MacOS Extended Apple suddenly implies in a Help text, that MacOS Extended is no longer strictly necessary, but is silent about the second requirement "Locally mounted". That is what prompted me to experiment, without luck.

You can't import an iPhoto library into an existing Photos library. All you can do is convert the library to another Photos library by dragging the iPhoto Library onto the Photos icon in the Dock (Photos must be closed).

If you want to join multiple libraries into one large library and keep all of the organizational effort intact you'll have to merge the iPhoto Libraries into one with the paid version of iPhoto Library Manager and then convert it to a Photos library.

léonie wrote:

I meant a drive used by Time Machine cannot be used to host a Photos Library, because the the ignore ownership flag cannot be set, or any remotely mounted drive with software installed that is preventing to set this flag.

As I wrote, I had no problem doing this on the internal hard drive of my Time Capsule, & it is most definitely being used as a Time Machine backup volume.

But again, while I could open Photos libraries on remotely mounted volumes I could not migrate them on these volumes.

As I wrote, I had no problem doing this on remotely mounted volumes using drives connected to the USB port of my Time Capsule. Specifically, I created a small (50 MB) iPhoto Library to test with, copied it to these volumes, & then opened them there with Photos, which created a migrated Photos Library on those same volumes. As expected, the extension of the iPhoto Libraries was changed from photolibrary to migratedphotolibrary & in all other respects I could determine behaved just like a migration on an internal or directly connected volume (but see below).

These drives were formatted as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled), which I assume to be a requirement not just to support iCloud services like Apple's documentation says, but also to support the hard links needed for the two libraries to share files (which they did).

The only difference I found was that if one of these Photos Libraries was the last library Photos used & I tried to eject the drive, I got a error message saying the drive could not be ejected because something (not identified) on that drive was in use, even if Photos was not running at the time. I have not yet investigated this other than using the 'force eject' option in the message to unmount the drive anyway, which did not prevent me from opening or using its Photos Library when I remounted the drive, or cause Photos to repair it after doing that.

This suggests some process besides Photos itself continues to use the current (last used) Photos Library even when the app itself is not running. Activity Monitor shows five processes with "photos" in their name, but I don't know how many of them need to do this.

I found a solution. Don't know if it'll work with you or not though.

What I did was I copy-pasted the iPhoto library from my hard disk in my dock. Then I clicked Command I or Get Info and I removed the "migrated" from the name and saved it as "iPhoto Library.photolibrary". Then I opened and it automatically started importing in my Photos app.

Hope this works 🙂

If that's the case, does that mean my options are iTunes Photo Sync or iCloud Photo Library (to which I can add iCloud Photo Sharing in the future if I want?)?

Yes, the migration needs plenty of working space during the migration. And the new Photos library will need additional storage, even if the photos will be shared by hard links.