Mac Photos Repair Library
Summary
Losing photos and Photos Library corrupting can really drive Mac users crazy. If you are facing such a problem, calm down and read this article. Follow methods on this page to repair your Photos Library and recover all lost photos with EaseUS data recovery software for Mac immediately.
- Mar 18, 2020 Your Photos library holds all your photos, albums, slideshows, and print projects. If your library is large, and you want to free up storage space on your Mac, turn on iCloud Photo Library and use Optimize Mac Storage, or move your library to an external drive. Before you start, be sure to back up your library.
- Mar 18, 2020 Follow these steps to use the Photos library repair tool: Hold down the Option and Command keys while you open Photos on your Mac. In the dialog that appears, click Repair to start the repair process.
Applies to all new macOS: 10.15 (Catalina), 10.14(Mojave), 10.13 (High Sierra), 10.12 and old Mac OS X like 10.11 (El Capitan), 10.9, etc.
The article provides full solutions to recover photos after Photos Library corruption and fix the corrupted Photos Library:
Restart your Mac via Apple menu-Restart. Now launch Photos app and check whether it is working or not. Note: You can force quit Photos app via Apple menu-Force Quit-Photos-Force quit. Fix 2: Repair the Photo Library. Launch Photos app. If it crashes, close it. Press and hold Command + Option keys and open the Photos app (while holding those.
| Workable Solutions | Step-by-step Troubleshooting |
|---|---|
| Part 1. Recover lost photos after Photos Library corruption | Fix 1. Restore lost photos with EaseUS Mac data recovery software in three steps..Full steps |
| Part 2. Repair corrupted Photos Library | Step 1. Close Photo Library if it's opened. |
Photos Library corrupted, help me restore my photos, please.
'Hi there, can anyone of you tell me how to restore my lost photos on Mac? The Photos Library corrupted suddenly. All my photos stored in the Photos Library all disappeared. What can I do?
Please help me. And this is important for me to recover photos. Any solutions or suggestions are all welcomed.'
How many of you guys are facing Photos Library crash or corrupt problem and unable to restore photos? Here EaseUS software provides effective methods to prevent similar problems from happening again, follow to repair Photos Library and recover all photos on Mac immediately.
Tip: Back up photos in case of losing them
If you didn't lose photos, the best choice is to backup them first. When unexpected troubles happen to your photos, you'll still have the backups. Here we recommend you to use Time Machine to backup all important photos and other data on Mac:
1. Click Time Machine and choose Set Up Time Machine.
2. Click Select Backup Disk or select locations (an external storage device is preferable) back up photos, and then click Use for Backup.
You can also copy photos and files one by one and paste to another storage device where you want to store the backups. Be patient and careful while copying and pasting.
Part 1. Recover lost photos after photos library corruption
If photos lost due to Photos application or Photos Library corruption, you have two ways to restore the lost photos: 1. Restore lost photos with Mac data recovery software; 2. Retrieve Photos Library with photos from Times Machine backup.
Method 1. Restore lost photos with EaseUS Mac data recovery software
If you didn't create a backup of Photos Library in the Time Machine, you'll need Mac data recovery software to help. We recommend you try EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac which supports to recover photos from corrupted Photo Library and even worse situations.
Step 1. Select the location where your valuable photos were lost and click Scan button.
Step 2. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac will start immediately a quick scan as well as a deep scan on your selected disk volume. Meanwhile, the scanning results will be presented in the left pane.
Step 3. By Path and Type, you can quickly filter the photos you've lost earlier. Select the target files and click Recover Now button to get them back at once.
Method 2. Restore corrupted Photos Library with photos from Time Machine backup
If you've created a backup of Photos Library with Time Machine, follow the steps below to restore Photos Library and all lost photos:
1. Connect Time Machine backup drive.
2. Click Time Machine in the Dock and enter Time Machine
3. Find backups - your photos then click Restore to recover lost photos.
Part 2. Repair corrupted Photos Library
If the Photos behaves unexpectedly or Photos Library corrupts, follow next steps to start repairing Photos Library with Photos library repair tool:
Step 1. Close Photo Library if it's opened.
Step 2. Relaunch Photo Library by holding Command + Option key.
Step 3. Click 'Repair' when the 'Repair Library' dialog pops up and ask whether you'd like to repair the library.
You might be asked to enter your account and password to authorize the library repair. And the Repair tool will analyze the database of Photos Library, repair detected errors.
If your Photos library is automatically updated with iCloud Photos, the entire contents of the library will re-updates with iCloud when the repair process completes.
Bonus Tip: Create a new Photos Library
The other alternative way to repair corrupted Photos Library is to create a new Photos Library on Mac. By doing so, you'll have your Photo Library back and reuse it to edit your photos again:
Step 1. Hold the Option key and double-click the Photos icon in the Applications folder (or click the Photos icon in the Dock).
Step 2. In the Choose Library dialogue, click Create New.
Step 3. Type a library name and choose a location to store the library. Click OK to confirm.
| Click here to return to the 'Rebuild the iPhoto Library' hint |
I wish I knew about that when iPhoto pooped out on me a few weeks back. I thought it was strange considering I have less than 100 photos stored in the application. Anyway, I ended up removing the library file. iPhoto rebuilt the library on the next restart and it started working again. I'm glad there's a more elegant way of doing this.
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Gypsy <gypsyx@manson.vistech.com>
robg comments that he's not sure when you would need to rebuild the library. The Apple forums are full of users who have 'lost photos'. Rebuilding the libary recatalogs them.
Note that changing a file name of a JPG file using the finder will make it 'invisible' to iPhoto. Changing the name back doesn't help. You must import the photo back into iPhoto. Loose enough photos this way and 'rebuild' option becomes quite attractive.
I wonder if iTunes has this feature? My library self-corrupted a while back (scattered tracks suddenly are marked as unknown/unavailable in the middle of sequences, although the files are still in place). (these are classical albums, nine piano trios in a folder for example, with two of them 'lost' by iTunes).
Hand-navigating to each folder for each 'lost' track is impossible til I reach retirement age some years hence.
It's all beta and I'm tired of it.
I rebuilt my library, having had a few problems with reimporting a backup I made.
It really messes with the ordering of photos, in a way that seems totally bizarre.. so I'd advise anyone doing this to watch out. You may have a slightly screwy library, but rebuilding it may make it really screwy :-
If you want to go back to the old library, just go to your com.apple.iPhoto.plist file in ~/Library/Preferences/ and look for the line:which in my file is line 171, and delete the _1
No wucking furries :-)
I rebuilt my library, having had a few problems with reimporting a backup I made.
It really messes with the ordering of photos, in a way that seems totally bizarre.. so I'd advise anyone doing this to watch out. You may have a slightly screwy library, but rebuilding it may make it really screwy :-
If you want to go back to the old library, just go to your com.apple.iPhoto.plist file in ~/Library/Preferences/ and look for the line:which in my file is line 171, and delete the _1
No wucking furries :-)
K0o bebuild a busted iPhoto library. I start by holding down SHIFT+OPTION as I launch iPhoto. Everything moves along fine while it loads maybe 10-15 pics that have the default name they were given on my camera - such a PC1200012.jpg. Then the hole process just stalls when it comes to a pic that I've named - such as ses3.JPG.
It just stalls the whole iPhoto library rebuilding process. Would anyone have a clue what's up here? Thanks!
Also ever since my original iPhoto library crashed, every time I try to import from my camera, iPhoto says, 'No camera is selected'. My camera is hooked up fine and I can locate the pictures, copy and everything. just can't import into iPhoto.
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How to restore deleted files. You can also sync them to iOS devices and view them on Apple TV. And if you want to use your own images as your desktop picture or screen saver, the images need to be in your System Photo Library before you can select them in System Preferences.If you have only one photo library, then it's the System Photo Library. Photos in your System Photo Library are available in apps like iMovie, Pages, and Keynote. You can use iCloud Photos, Shared Albums, and My Photo Stream only with the System Photo Library.
Why would you need it?
Well you might have a desktop and a laptop Mac and your might have a program like FoldersSynchronizer and you might say to yourself, 'Self, it sure would be great to have the exact same iPhoto libraries on both Macs, wouldn't it?' and you might think that FoldersSynchronizer would be a good way of doing so.
Of course, I'd never try that with my data..
.. I did it with a friend's.
Pulling all the originals out of those 'dated' folders (thank goodness they were there, even if iPhoto didn't see them), trashing everything else and then re-importing them (wow! iPhoto must have used the EXIF data and not just dated them by the day you imported them .. DOH!) was a real pain-in-the-but-tocks.
Or you might just be plain stupid and try the syncing yourself, ignoring a warning dialog ('There is a Folder blah blah blah'), and suddenly the Library info is gone.
Of course something stupid like that would NEVER happen to me!
Thanks for this great tip! It really helped, and is better and faster than just importing the pictures from a backup!
Alex
My library currently has 4100 photos and about 500 rolls, dating back to 1998. Doing the rebuild speeded up things dramatically on my Cube. But, the renumbering of the rolls makes rebuilding the library inacceptable for me. Just can't find anything any more. I wish there were a trick to maintain or reconstruct the roll information.
If you give each roll a name, it will retain that name after the rebuild.
HMM
Just upgraded to iLife 5.0.1 and wanted to have my thumbnails (Library) rebuild since some of the thumbnails are looking a lot worse than others - even though they're all shot with the same Nikon D100 at the same settings.
Anyways it seems that the shortcut to invoke the Library rebuilding is CMD-OPT - not the before mentioned SHIFT-OPT.
The latter - or just SHIFT - gives you they upportunity to create a new album or choose another preexisting album.
Anyways I'll hit the 'Rebuild Library' button now and see how long time it takes to have 2.300 6 megapixel images rebuilded on my old TiBook ;-)
Hmm - the thumbnail-files are NOT rebuild, I wonder how you can acheive that WITHOUT having to re-import all the images
BINGO - with iPhoto 5.0.2 you now get four different items to choose from when you hold CMD-OPT down during the launch of iPhoto - one of them being 'Rebuild Thumbnails'.
It took a whole hour (with 100% CPU-load) for my 867 MHz TiBook to rebuild everything (2.700 six megapixel Nikon D100 shots) - but it was definately worth the wait since my bad looking thumbnail-problem is SOLVED now.
I guess someone should rewrite the hint, anyways - now it's in a comment ;-)
PS.: I guess it (still) helps to tell Apple what features/bugs you find (I did :-)
Apple Photos Repair Library
..And in iLife '06 the rebuild modifier keys are <command><option><shift>.
Photos Updating Library
I have a question related to this hint.
I ran out of space on my powerbook, and started burning pictures off to DVD before importing them, with the 'copy files to library..' feature turned off. This created a bad situation where iPhoto gets stuck looking for files that it can't find because their volumes aren't mounted. For image files, this only happens when you select them to do something with them, but apparently there's a bug in iPhoto in which if you have a movie file on an unmounted disc, it immediately looks for it at startup of iPhoto and hangs up with the Spinning Beach Ball of Death unless you have the volume available. So my iPhoto has become essentially unusable.
So, i took an old 120GB drive out of my old G4 tower, wiped it, and have repurposed it as a photos-only drive. I know i can just move the iPhoto Library to that drive and then point iPhoto at it, but i'd also like to rebuild it so that all of the originals are moved into the iPhoto library, basically returning it to a normal state with the 'copy photos to library..' feature enabled.
Another way to put it that I think makes sense is this: I want to perform a function that does the same thing as iTunes' 'Consolidate Library' command. This command in iTunes takes all of your dispersed music files and puts them in the correct place in the iTunes Music Library folder. That's what I want to happen with iPhoto - take the files that aren't in the iPhoto Library folder and move them into their correct location in there.
Is there a way to use the Rebuild Library function to do this? Has anyone experienced this before?
Thanks
Max
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107947