icloud photos - formatting error

OK, I just got off the phone with Apple Support and it was much easier than it seems.

First, shut down. Then reboot, and then immediately hold the Command+R, until you see the progress bar, then release.

Then, you should get a screen that has 4 choices - choose the bottom one - Disk Utility.

Select your HD on left and run "First Aid" (first button in center menu). It should take a few minutes to run.

Once complete, restart from apple menu, and sign in as normal. Your iCloud Photos should be working.

I just ran into this issue. This happened after Mojave. I did a fresh install...synced the entire iCloud photos on Mojave and now suddenly it won't sync to iCloud anymore. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

I just discovered the same issue on my iMac15,1 after upgrading to Mojave. I do have an external drive, which was not formatted as APFS but this isn't used by Photos.app. I used Disk Utility to change it from HFS+ to APFS and it claimed to have failed, although the format now reports back as APFS... I seem to have fixed the issue by deleting the login keychain and also anything related to Photos and iCloud Photos in ~/Library/Containers.

Photos appear to be syncing to my iPhone, but Photos.app on the iMac is now uploading almost 50k images to iCloud...

Now that we know for sure, that Photos 4.0 can work with an APFS fusion drive - thanks to dwb, you may want to test if the problem is system wide or only occurs in your current user account. (See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204443)

If the problem is not system wide, it may suffice to start over with a new user account.

I posted a link to your solution in the User Tip section. This way it will be easier to find again, if someone else has the same problem. How to fix "iCloud Photos is only available on macOS Standard, macOS Extended and APFS formatted volumes" on Macs with a Fusion Drive

I forgot to give specs:

21.5-inch iMac with Retina 4K display

Hardware:

• 3.6GHz quad-core 7th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz
• 16GB 2400MHz DDR4
• 1TB Fusion Drive
• Radeon Pro 560 with 4GB video memory

When you launch Photos again, hold down the options key ⌥ until you are seeing the library chooser dialog. Then you can select the correct Photos Library on your system drive or create a new, empty library.

I am at a loss. Mojave is supposed to support Fusion drives as startup volumes.

It looks like a bug to me, perhaps their is another problem and the error message is wrong.

I'll ask the system experts if someone can help.

Brad, I have a similar iMac with Fusion drive and haven't seen this. Like Léonie I'm at a loss and can offer only two suggestions: 1) Call AppleCare, perhaps with all the calls they've had since Mojave's release this has come up a time or two. 2) if the darn thing is complaining about the format, after a complete backup go through the hassle of wiping the drive, reformatting, and restoring from the backup. (I'm cringing at this suggestion so go for #1 first unless someone else pops in with an idea.)

I have the same problem - MBP 15" 2017, internal SSD only, iCloud photos worked fine, upgraded to Mojave, and now I get the weird "you need an APFS disk even though the only disk you have is an APFS disk" error. I tried this fix this morning, and it didn't fix it. And now all my passwords are gone, which is a pain.

That is a surprising solution, William. Thank you for posting this. Is your Mac also an iMac with fusion drive?

Can you tell us, how you upgraded to Mojave? Did the Mojave upgrade convert the internal drive to APFS or has it been formatted as APFS all along, after an upgrade to High Sierra?

Interesting . . . tried it a second time and it did solve the problem. The first time First Aid ran it said in the details that it was examining 4 snapshots of metadata. The second time it ran it said it was examining 8 snapshots. No idea what changed from the first to the second but I can confirm that the system has restarted a number of times now and the Photos APFS problem has not returned.

BTW, my system is an iMac21" which was converted to APFS by the Mojave upgrade.

Same problem here. Temporarily fixed using Disk Utilites but it came back weeks later.No reboot during this time. Photos just decided stop working by itself sometime.

My system is iMac 2017 with 1T SSD internal drive so it’s completely irrelavent to FusionDrive issue. Simply a bug in either APFS or iCloud.

Trying to fix again with Disk Utilites and see whether and when it will come back again.

While the "First Aid" helps, somebody should clearly state that there is an error in MacOS which causes it to falsely assume that the disk in use is not an internal disk.

From what I observed, this problem is caused by connecting another server via afp and then at another time not being connected to this server. Maybe OSX is puzzled with numbering the disks or whatever. Apple, your turn to fix this.