Another Photos question

TidBITS Talk
1

Last night I ran into a new problem with Photos - see picture.

Screenshot 2025-08-28 at 11.58.25
Screenshot 2025-08-28 at 11.58.25861×548 131 KB

Photos sits on an external drive with (currently) over 4 TB of free space.
I’m wondering if I have reached a capacity limit for Photos.
There are slightly in excess of 27,000 items, including about 1,500 videos.

in every other respect Photos is working well. It just won’t let me add a new batch of Grandchildren pix sent from abroad. The new pix are a combination of jpegs and HEIC.

I’m going to run first aid/disk Doctor on the drive, but .'Ill wait to see what materialises in the comments.
Any thoughts?

2

How much free space is on your system disk? I can think of scenarios where Photos might need to cache the data on your system disk en route to integrating them into your library on the external disk.

3

I don’t think this is a factor. I have just over 90,000 items in my Photos Library which is on my 2TB internal, with 850GB free.

As already suggested low internal space might be factor, otherwise I can’t suggest a reason for what you see, but actions I might consider in your shoes would be running Disk First Aid (in Disk Utility) on the external drive, and perhaps internal as well, and repairing the Photos library, (hold Opt+Cmd keys while launching the app).

4

Now this is getting serious - and rather puzzling.

As above I repaired the Photos library - that took a couple of hours, and then copied the entire drive to another. There were four item on the drive; 2 folders of photos totalling about 55GB, and old iPhotos library and the Photos Library.

What i didn’t do was open Photos to see if the issue was resolved - forgot all about that!

I then ran disk first aid but was met with a message (to the effect of)
‘the operation could not be carried out because the disk would not unmount’.

I tried ejecting the disk but got the message ‘the disk could not be ejected because one or more applications are using it’

No applications were running at that moment - other than Finder.

I rebooted the Mini M2 and tried again with First Aid. Once again the same could not unmount message.
However, It did allow me to eject the drive.
Remounting still wouldn’t let first aid have a go.

I decided to erase the drive and start again.
This was successful.

Now the fun
I copied the first three items back to the original drive - that was successful.
But… while the copying was going on, a fourth item appeared as a ghost with a title that was something like photosphotoslibrary (i didn’t screenshot it).
I attempted to copy the Photos Library back but was refused as "there is already an item called Photos Library - even though clearly there wasn’t.

I tried to deleted the ghost item and was unable to.

Wiped the disk again and started afresh.

The first three items copied over successfully, and this there was no ghost item.
I set the Photos Library to copy back, waited for it to start, then went to bed.

This morning I was greeted with this

Screenshot 2025-08-30 at 13.47.17
Screenshot 2025-08-30 at 13.47.17868×491 97.9 KB

The timer indicated that there was 7 minutes to go to completion.

I was able to delete the incomplete transfer and started again.

The same result, this time with 6 minutes to go and 30GB left to copy.

I am now thoroughly confused.

Any help would be greatly appreciated (very greatly!)

5

Difficult to know what is happening. I would try using CCC to copy back instead of Finder. If it fails it is likely to give you more info about why and what to do about it.

6

I second @mikebhm’s suggestion of using CCC.

However, I’d first check each storage device’s integrity.

7

Follow up. Success using CCC. Photos will now accept those images that were refused earlier.
Another benefit! Photos launches almost instantly now instead of taking between 5 & 10 seconds. I was quite startled when it happened.
The only thing to worry about (at the moment) is that it is reluctant to accept keywords into images.
Hopefully after it’s been running a while that will improve.