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Tried to open photos library from a network drive. Now giant iCloud Photos.zip in trash

It has been a while, and when I tried to open my photos library from a network drive it was taking forever to upgrade it, so I left it overnight. In the morning had the error "Photos was unable to open the library (-1)", my photos library is empty and there is a giant iCloud Photos.zip (21.75 G) in my local trash, and another iCloud photos library that is empty as well. I assume the zip is all my photos the app just helpfully threw away... why would this ever be a smart design feature? Help!


MacBook Pro, OS X 10.10

Posted on Oct 20, 2022 7:25 AM

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Posted on Oct 20, 2022 8:13 AM

Photos has not been designed to work with a Photos Library on a network drive. The Photos Library needs to be on a locally mounted disk.


When you restore the Photos Library from the Trash, put it onto a locally mounted external volume, prepared as described here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support


As long as you re keeping the library on a network share, you are risking to lose your pictures:

Make sure that your external storage device, such as a USB drive or Thunderbolt drive, is formatted for Mac: either APFS format or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.

You can't store your library on a storage device used for Time Machine backups. And to avoid possible data loss, don't store your library on a removable storage device like an SD card or USB flash drive, or on a device shared over your network or the internet, including over a cloud-based storage service.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 20, 2022 8:13 AM in response to datbates

Photos has not been designed to work with a Photos Library on a network drive. The Photos Library needs to be on a locally mounted disk.


When you restore the Photos Library from the Trash, put it onto a locally mounted external volume, prepared as described here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support


As long as you re keeping the library on a network share, you are risking to lose your pictures:

Make sure that your external storage device, such as a USB drive or Thunderbolt drive, is formatted for Mac: either APFS format or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.

You can't store your library on a storage device used for Time Machine backups. And to avoid possible data loss, don't store your library on a removable storage device like an SD card or USB flash drive, or on a device shared over your network or the internet, including over a cloud-based storage service.

Oct 20, 2022 10:53 PM in response to datbates

I have tested occasionally what will happen to a Photos Library on a network share, on iCloud Drive, etc, just to check on Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support.

I have never seen a Photos Library ending up in the Trash, just by trying to use it on a network storage or in another unsuitable location. All that happened has been, that Photos might crash or hang or lose the connection to the library, or and has been creating new, empty libraries in the Pictures folder, because it had been unable to open the selected Library. Plus the dataloss (missing images, inconsistent metadata) caused by race conditions ans syncing errors, that are to be expected, when accessing a database over a network, that has not been designed as network database. As you are a software engineer yourself, you will know, that network access to a database requires to make the database transaction safe against race conditions. This additional syncing will slow the access down and makes the code more involved. So there is a tradeoff between designing the Photos Library as a full-fledged network database or a slim, fast single-user, local database.

Apple's current design is a compromise - keeping a local version of the Photos Library on locally mounted volumes on each device, and letting them sync with iCloud Photos. This way we can access our Photos Library remotely in iCloud, but not remotely on our local home network.


I cannot reproduce the kind of damage you had to your Photos Library, this is not the normal behaviour - you may want to send a bug report to Apple, for example, using the feedback form for a short report: Feedback - Photos - Apple


Is the system version stated below your original post still valid? MacBook Pro, OS X 10.10 ?



Oct 20, 2022 9:11 AM in response to léonie

My photos library is over 500 gigabytes... Apple is all about wireless everything, why don't they make this work. Oh well. I'm just giving up on Photos then. I'll just keep a huge folder of photos like the old days. I'm using Google Photos as my main storage because of it's better interoperability and search-ability anyway. I'll just restore my library that they tossed and do it the old fashioned way. This used to work just fine with iPhoto.

Oct 20, 2022 10:49 AM in response to datbates

A NAS is a headless computer with its own operating system, usually a version of Linux. You're trying to run a Mac database from a Linux computer, so that's the first problem. Further, you'll struggle to find a photo manager that will work in that scenario, even pro level ones like Lightroom Classic will have problems managing the relationship across a wireless connection. There are apps that will do this, such as Canto Cumulus (Price on application) and Binder (same), Extensis Portfolio ("Talk to an Expert"), but I would not expect them to be in the same price range as Photos. I've seen quotes along the lines of $1k per user per year. Good luck!

Oct 20, 2022 5:39 PM in response to Yer_Man

My server is a Mac mini, so there is no problem with file system or anything. I am not asking for amazing performance... just that a program that is supposed to store photos not throw them away, and eventually accomplish what it is supposed to do. I don't think that is too much to ask.


I am a software architect myself with 25 years of experience. I am embarrassed for the engineers on the Photos team. They should seriously be ashamed of themselves. I could never live with myself if my program went so wrong without working tirelessly to make sure something like that could never happen again. I can't even imagine the depravity of software that is supposed to protect files that instead throws them away. At least they could pop up an error like "Sorry you can't have a photo library on a network share" or at least "Sorry an error occurred" and leave the files alone. Honestly... I think this is a rethink your life's choices kind of huge fail. They shouldn't have to rely on you kindly folks to try to cover for their failure. They should come here, apologize, and put some minor amount of effort into it. It is not like we don't pay a premium price for their stuff. I don't expect them to do that, but I would and have.


Oct 24, 2022 8:17 AM in response to léonie

The photo library in the trash seems to have not been related. It seems to be just gone. All 500+ GB. Library was empty and needed to restored from backup. I believe the backup was not completely up to date, so I am going to have to hope that my Google Photos copy is more stable than what is in my local Apple Photos copy.


There is nothing slim or fast about their database, if their app performance is indicative ;-). They should opt for more stable at this point. I didn't suggest that I ever had photos open in multiple places at the same time. I was trying to use it from one system. It is not compatible with photos on my iMac since Apple has upgraded their file format several times, and the iMac knows nothing about its location. Maybe Apple has built in some library discovery stuff which caused contention? I think this improbable but possible. I would say they should have a check built into their code to prevent it being open in multiple places if it truly was a single user database, but I don't think it is.


The database for a photo library is super small comparitively. Personally I would fully cache it in RAM during use and stream changes to disk. That should have prevented any inconsistencies in the disk copy. This seems a clear choice if it really is a single user database. I expect odds are it isn't a single use database, and there is some face processing daemon or something asynchronously accessing it as well... maybe causing the issues. Regardless, I expect my problem is probably not due to a performance decision as you suggest, just poor design.


The database questions are really moot. Regardless of database design the managed media file data should not have been lost if this system was designed properly. Maybe the database would be corrupted at very worst and need to be rebuilt.... Still the media files should be intact and present. The software must be badly designed... period.


I will create a bug report. My system version is a MacBook Pro, OS X 12.5 on an M1.

Tried to open photos library from a network drive. Now giant iCloud Photos.zip in trash

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