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User profile for user: mrmut
mrmut Author
User level: Level 1
27 points

Error when importing images into Photos / images can be opened normally

I have an issue on Catalina (10.15.7) where I can not import old archive of iPhone images into Photos application.


I tried on 2 macs with Catalina, and it is a no go. I get the usual the image can not be opener because of unsupported format and below by the image name it says that the image can not be accessed.


  • I repaired the drive, checked privileges and nothing helps.
  • All images show and open normally in Preview
  • If I save an image in Preview, it can be added to Photos


Any idea what I should do? - This is an old iPhone 4 archive, and I allready successfully imported archives from 3GS and iPhone 5.


Any help appreciated.

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 26, 2020 5:04 PM

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User profile for user: léonie
léonie
User level: Level 10
197,321 points

Posted on Dec 27, 2020 5:52 AM

A Photos Library can get damaged, when you copy it to a a NTFS drive or a NAS. Use only locally mounted volumes prepared as described here to move your Photos Libraries between Macs: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support


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User profile for user: mrmut
mrmut Author
User level: Level 1
27 points

Dec 27, 2020 5:16 AM in response to TonyCollinet

It was, but I copied internally. It did seem to me that the permissions are kind of trivial on mac.


The files were copied from NAS to another mac, and then to a NTFS drive and then carried to destination mac and copied there.


Whatever I did I couldn't import, but in the end I managed to do it by copying the folder first to original source mac (where I made the archive), and then making a copy for it. Then I tried import in local photos library and it worked. After that I moved destination library to source mac and imported photos there and it worked.


How? - I don't have a slightest clue. On Windows I can quite simply just take over the ownership of the file or folder, but on Mac these mysterious things happen for which one needs magic to solve.


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Error when importing images into Photos / images can be opened normally

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