Unable to select 'iCloud Photo Library' after restoring Mac

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Level 1

8 points

Unable to select 'iCloud Photo Library' after restoring Mac

Hello everyone, this is my first time asking a question here.

I have a MacBook Pro with a photo library of 57,214 photos (317GB) stored on an external hard drive. I recently uploaded all of these photos to iCloud Library (it took 5 days!) but just yesterday I had to do a clean OS install. Since then, I've been trying to set up Photos again.

My library on the HD is set as the system library, but when I select 'iCloud Photo Library' with the 'Download originals to this Mac' option, it selects it, starts to upload, then cancels it out. If I try to select it again, the same thing happens.

Two minutes later...

Can anyone advise what I can do? Do I need to delete the photos from the Cloud and try again?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)

Posted on Sep 16, 2016 6:18 AM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

200,897 points

Sep 16, 2016 6:32 AM in response to laowai184

The problem may be, that the free storage is not sufficient to download all originals from iCloud in addition to the photos already in your library.

it might be easier to download the library from iCloud to an empty library instead of uploading the. library again.

Do you have projects in your Photos Library, that you need to save, or invested a lot of work in naming Faces?

if not, then move your current Photos Library to an external drive as a backup copy, and delete the library from your internal drive.

Launch Photos with the options key held down to bring up the Library Chooser panel.
Select to create a new library.
Then make this new library your System Photos Library and enable iCloud. Your photos and albums will start to download. This will be faster than uploading. again and merging the two libraries.

But downloading will not restore the named faces and not the projects. SO you need to keep the original library to access your projects and have a reference for the faces that will need restoring.

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