How To Fix A Damaged macOS Photos Library

My wife is the archivist who keeps all our family’s digital photos on her MacBook Air, and she uses the default macOS app to edit and manage them: Photos. Because this digital photo album is irreplaceable, it’s not only backed up the usual way (with Time Machine), I also manually copy the Photos library (which contains all the original image files) to various external and portable drives on a regular basis.

The last time I prepared for a manual backup I saw the usual sequence of messages, but this time it culminated with an error proclaiming that some data in the Photos library cannot be read or written. The copy came to a full stop and failed. I tried other drives, but no luck. The Photos library --which is essentially a database containing all the original image files-- apparently had a corrupt file that was serious enough it couldn’t be copied or backed up.

I tried running disk repair tools on the drive the library was stored on, but everything appeared fine.

What now?

Apparently Apple has seen this happen before, because the company has a hidden Photos library repair tool. Here’s how you can use it to fix issues with Photos, including a library refusing to open or showing errors when copying.

There’s no software to download, all you have to do is hold down the OPTION and COMMAND buttons while launching Photos. You’ll need an Administrator name and password for the computer to authorize running the repair tool.

You’ll be prompted to either Repair the library or Quit.

If you go ahead with the repair, the system will display a progress bar while it chugs away. Depending on the size of the photos library and the speed of the Mac being used, this could take a few hours.

At this point, the repair tool has been running for about an hour and a half (the library is just over 230 GB) and has passed the halfway point in the operation.

And now the library repair tool has completed the process.

If everything worked and the library repair tool fixed whatever issues it found, Photos — and its library — should be back to normal. If not, the problems are a little deeper. Still no need to panic, there are other steps that can be taken.

I’ll cover that in another how-to post...