Photo - Unable to Make a Copy

I kept my photo library on an external WB My Passport drive before Photos (ie. iPhoto) and it worked fine. Now I cannot access over 10 years worth of photos!!

What is the file system on that drive? To migrate your iPhoto Library to Photos it needs to be on a drive with the file system MacOS Extended (Journaled). Can you move the library to a correctly formatted drive?

If you haven't removed iPhoto from Yosemite 10.10.3, you could use it (still in your system)

to create the iPhoto Library copy on an external location; then use it with Photos later.

There are certain tags and metadata information that may not transfer or be available in

an iPhoto library once converted to Photos. There are some support articles about Photos

that may be helpful in the transition, the one application really does not replace the other.

In your Mac's help viewer (access from menu bar help) you can search Photos in support;

other articles may appear that seem superficial or beginner level, so you'd need to look

further to see what else they've considered. An example of simple is as follows, though it

probably won't help at the point you are now:

•Get started with Photos for OS X - Apple Support

There is a new Photos Library upgrader (link in above article) that may or may not help.

So hopefully this will be helpful to resolve the issue. You may need to inspect the Library

and be sure it was not damaged. There is a way to rebuild the old iPhotos library, but not

certain how that may affect your transition to use of new Photos, where your issue is now.

Good luck in any event...! 🙂

I am seeing two problems with your "My Passport". It is formatted case sensitive, and that is not a good idea, if your system drive is not formatted case sensitive. This can result in ambitious filenames and you are risking to lose data this way.

The second problem is, that the drive is a Time Machine volume. Photos will not open Photos Libraries on a Time Machine volume, and you cannot enable the "Ignore Ownership on this Volume" flag, and that will result in permissions errors. The "Sharing & Permissions" section should look like this, but it is not possible on a Time Machine drive:

Relocate the library you want to migrate to a separate drive, that you are not using for Time Machine. Format this drive exactly like your system drive and enable the "Ignore Ownership Flag" to prevent permission errors. It is more convenient anyway to have the library on a different drive, since Time Machine cannot back up files that are on the Time Machine drive. So you need a second drive for the backup of your photo library.

Hope this is helpful. Journaled appears to be missing - is that significant?

The drive is formatted "Journaled" as shown in the second line of the format.

You also raise another point for me. I was thinking about buying an AirPort Time Capsule for wireless storage throughout my apartment and - importantly - to use it as for Time Machine.

You can connect an external drive to the Time Capsule, that could be used for additional data. But it is not recommended to put any important data on a Time Machine volume for storage, for several reasons:

1. Time Machine cannot make any backups of data on its drive.
2. And Time Machine will use up any storage it can get. Sooner or later you will have no working storage for the photo library.
3. Photos will not open the library at all on a Time Machine drive.
4. iPhoto does open libraries on a Time Machine volume, but if you open the library from different user accounts you will run into permission errors because of the missing "Ignore ownership" flag and be forced to continually repair the library.
5. We do not know for sure, if a Photos Library can be used on a network storage, like a NAS or Time Capsule. For iPhoto Libraries it is clear that it is risky and will result in data loss, see "Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library (this applies to iPhoto Libraries as well)". For Photos libraries I have not found any documentation by Apple, if network access is now supported. But I doubt it, since Apple's solution for remote access to the library is iCloud Photo Library (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204264) I would not risk my Photos Library on a remotely mounted volume until we know for sure, if it is supported.