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Level 1

14 points

icloud photos - formatting error

New iMac being setup. Opened photos and went to turn on iCloud Photos and getting this error:

"iCloud Photos is only available on macOS Standard, macOS Extended and APFS formatted volumes."

To check the format of a volume, select the volume in the Finder and choose Get Info from the File menu. The type of volume appears in the Format field.

This is a new 21" iMac with Fusion drive. It is formatted as APFS. Unsure of why I am getting this error and cannot turn on the cloud photo sharing.

iMac, iOS 12

Posted on Sep 27, 2018 5:24 AM

Apple recommended

williamfromeaston

Level 1

22 points

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.

Posted on Oct 8, 2018 5:49 PM

View in context

26 replies

Oct 21, 2018 2:46 PM in response to williamfromeaston

Absolutely. This needs to go to the top of the list of replies. MacBook Pro w/ Flash Drive.

Oct 27, 2018 1:00 PM in response to williamfromeaston

Brilliant. Worked for me. Thank you.

Oct 27, 2018 1:41 PM in response to léonie

Honestly, I don't know what the pre- vs. post- Mojave update format was. I purchased that computer in April 2018, so it may have come with High Sierra on it.

Oct 27, 2018 1:42 PM in response to léonie

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

léonie

Level 10

193,396 points

Oct 27, 2018 3:01 PM in response to williamfromeaston

Thank you for the additional information, William. That fits in with what the other people posted.

zit

Level 1

46 points

Nov 7, 2018 4:09 PM in response to Brad2610a

Thanks for the solution.
Didn't expect it to cure the problem, but it did :-)

léonie

Level 10

193,396 points

Nov 8, 2018 2:30 AM in response to williamfromeaston

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

Nov 28, 2018 1:29 PM in response to williamfromeaston

Unfortunately it works once and then the problem comes back.

Nov 29, 2018 4:06 AM in response to stentor007

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.

Nov 29, 2018 4:31 PM in response to Brad2610a

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.

SamDo

Level 1

8 points

Jan 23, 2019 4:21 AM in response to Brad2610a

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.

icloud photos - formatting error