Photos Repairing Library Is Stuck

Reader Celia Drummond had a Mac crash so severe, she had to upgrade her system from Mavericks to El Capitan—I didn’t ask about Sierra—although she was able to recover her data from Time Machine.

Use the Photos library repair tool on a Mac. Mac users have access to an additional tool that isn’t available on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch: the Photos library repair tool. This piece of software finds and repairs inconsistencies in your library. These inconsistencies might be the reason Photos can’t finish analyzing the library on your. Select File Manage Catalogs. The Catalog Manager dialog box opens. In the Catalog Manager dialog box, select the catalog that you want to repair. Select a catalog and click Repair to repair catalog issues. After Elements Organizer completes the check for errors, select Re-index Visual Similarity Data and then click Repair Anyway. Quit Photos and re-launch it. Using the Terminal to “kill” certain Photos-related background agents and jobs. (This is a little tweaky and can cause problems, so I hesitate to recommend it.

However, after using the iPhoto Library Upgrader, Apple’s recommended path for converting iPhoto 7 and earlier libraries to a newer format that iPhoto 8 and 9 can use, “The result is photos a fraction of their original size—most were between 1MB and 7MB each—and all are pixelated.”

I never used the utility, so I don’t know what went wrong, but something did if that’s the outcome, or something is missing in the Time Machine backup. Because she can’t run the older version of iPhoto, she can’t simply rebuild the library, which is the usual suggestion. (I’d make sure you had version 1.1 via the link above, as older versions are out there, too.)

I’d normally suggest for forward version compatibility to try to find an intermediate version of software, which has been useful for folks with various older releases of the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote). However, the only course of action with an iPhoto 7 library is apparently to run it through the upgrader; you can’t just try to open it in iPhoto 8 (or 9). (I don’t have older libraries to check this out, so I’m relying on Apple and forum posters.)

Photos

Repairing Photos Library Stuck At 5

Photos Repairing Library Is Stuck

If the upgrader just won’t work with the old library, the only real solution is to crack open the library and extract ones photos.

  1. Control-click the iPhoto Library.
  2. Choose Show Package Contents from the contextual menu.
  3. Drag (to move) or Option-drag (to copy) the Masters folder to the Desktop or to another drive.
  4. Launch the latest version of iPhoto 9 and import that Masters folder. Or launch Photos and do the same.
Photos Repairing Library Is Stuck

Photos Repairing Library Is Stuck In Icloud

Stuck

Unfortunately, you’ll lose a lot of information associated with photos and video that’s stored within the library, such as metadata, potentially some edits, albums, and other organizational elements. But this is better than losing the high-resolution versions of your media.

Photos Repairing Library Is Stuck

After importing the images and videos and making sure they’re the high-resolution ones you want, you can then use a de-duplication program, like PowerPhotos or Photosweeper 3 (review coming), which can clean up the low-resolution images and possibly help fix the missing metadata.

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Photos Repairing Library Is Stuck Video

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