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Some pictures will not export from Photos in Catalina

My pictures show up fine in Photos but I when I export them, some won't export. It appears to be a larger problem with HDR photos than regular ones, but some HDR will export and some regular ones won't. I can drag the photos to airdrop to another device which works okay for regular pictures but for the HDR ones I lose most of the integrity (a 2.2 MB pictures exports to around 300KB), so I don't want to do that.


I have tried to rebuild the library but that doesn't work either.


The export gives me the very informative message "Unexpected Error (4)", which is no help and a list of pictures that failed to export, but as Photos won't show you the name of each picture, it is a very manual process to go through the list one by one. To compound this, you can't look at the photos while the error box is open, so you have to copy the photo names.


I would like to get the original pictures out of Photos or at least find a better way to identify which pictures didn't export. I had 1300 picture in the library and 186 didn't export so it is going to take a while to do this manually. The errors are very random as I have tried to export between 10 and 60 at a time and most batches have at least one error, so it isn't a group of pictures.


I am running Catalina 10.15.3.

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Apr 9, 2020 5:32 AM

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Apr 9, 2020 7:53 AM in response to abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzab

Are you using iCloud Photos? Then you need an internet connection to Apple's cloud servers to be able to export photos, that have not yet been downloaded from iCloud. Could that be the problem?


How are you exporting? Are you using "File > Export > export unmodified original" or are you using the modified versions with "File > Export > Export ... photos".

If you have not tried to export the originals, try "File > Export > export unmodified original". If your Photos Library should be holding older photos and videos, Photos 5.0 may not be able to process them any longer. Some image formats and codecs are no longer supported in Catalina.


Some pictures will not export from Photos in Catalina

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