Live photos cannot import into Photos app in High Sierra

The problem is probably the case-sensitive part of the format. If the filesystem on the external drive is treating files named Ax.JPG as different from AX.JPG, you are risking conflicts with the filenames.

If this is the issue, save your library temporarily on another drive formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled), but not case-sensitive.

To make the Live Photos come to live again, that you imported lifeless, you will have to delete all traces of the Live Photos that did not work from the library, before you try to import them again from your iPhone.

Is your iPhone an iPhone 7 or a newer model? The iPhone 7 can take photos in HEIF format and videos in HEVC format since iOS 11 came out. Photos on High Sierra cannot handle the high resolution HVEC videos, if the Mac is older than late 2015. If videos will not play, change the settings on your iPhone to take the videos in a more compatible format, see: Using HEIF or HEVC media on Apple devices - Apple Support

I'm stuck in what seems like the same boat, but without a solution.

My Photos library is on an external HD that's formatted MacOS Extended (Case-Sensitive, Journaled).

I was able to download Live Photos to it until I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 11.

I assumed High Sierra would solve the problem on the iMac side, but it did not.

I can only retrieve Live Photos from my iPhone using the Image Capture app and downloading to the iMac's Fusion Drive. Then I can import into the Photos library.

Here's the twist... the Fusion Drive is not formatted APFS because that format is not yet supported. It is MacOS Extended (Journaled) without case sensitivity.

I tried converting the external HD to APFS but got an error in Disk Utility.

I tried copying the entire Photos library from the external HD to my Pictures directory on the iMac, but it stopped halfway through and gave an error message that "You can't copy 'Photos Library.photoslibrary' because it has the same name as another item on the destination volume, and that volume doesn't distinguish between upper- and lowercase letters in filenames."

Seeing how there is no existing Photos library on the destination volume, I can only assume there are files within the "package" that have the same filename but different capitalizations, and the Finder can't handle it.

So, as I said, I'm stuck.

Also, it is notable that my problem did not really originate with High Sierra but with iOS 11.

Any suggestions??

I'm glad it worked. Good luck!

BTW, the case-sensitive problem in connection with Live-photos has first been mentioned by scar86 in this discussion, as far as I know - I just remembered, that I had seen a similar issue: Re: Unable to import iOS 11 photos HEIF

is your Photos Library on an external drive or on an your system drive? If the library is on an external drive, check the file system format. Is the filesystem on the external drive case-sensitive and on the system drive not? This might explain the missing video components.

Still having this problem. I finally managed to convert my external HD from "MacOS Extended (Case-Sensitive, Journaled)" to APFS. But now it shows up as "APFS (Case-sensitive)" and still won't import Live Photos.

I don't understand how I am supposed to copy my Photos Library from a case-sensitive drive to a non-sensitive one. As noted above, when I tried copying it to my non-sensitive internal Fusion Drive, it failed.

Help!?