ghostwriter1969 wrote:
Hi
I located the main photos library on an external HDD. After a HDD failure, I recovered all the data from the HDD failed and I copied it to a new HDD named ad the 1st one.
Now photos doesn't recognise the library. From the popup message that asked me to indicate a library, I linked Photo to the recovered library but seeing that Photos was uploading the photos to the cloud, I paused it.
That is normal behaviour. When you switch between libraries and enable iCloud Photos, the complete Photos Library needs to be uploaded to iCloud and merged into the existing library. This will usually not compare duplicates in Cloud, because Photos will compare the iCloud photos library to the currently open library and solve conflicts between duplicates. But it takes a very long time. The merged library will sync from iCloud back to your Mac.
Now I wonder how I can set things up so that Photos synchronizes retrieved library from iCloud and not the other way around.
If you are sure, that the library in iCloud is complete and current, and you do not need the photos from your recovered library, you could simply save it on an external drive, delete it from your Mac and start over with an empty library. When you launch Photos while holding down the options key ⌥ you can select to create a new library. Make this new library your system Photos Library in the Photos Preferences > General and your iCloud Library in the Photos > Preferences > iCloud.
The library should download from iCloud to your Mac, and you will save the time for the lengthy upload.
The drawback will be , that the projects cannot be recovered from iCloud. You will need the recovered library to use the older projects. But the photos, videos, albums, and most of the named faces should be there. Faces sync with iCloud since macOS 10.13. I noticed, that only the automatically detected faces are syncing well with iCloud. The manually added aces are frequently missing and I have to add them again.
