Photos are missing but cannot be re-imported

Question

Photos are missing but cannot be re-imported

I have a large photo library - over 30K photos. I recently discovered that several thousand photos were missing from 2015.

I thought I just hadn't imported them from lightroom properly when I migrated, so I re-exported from lightroom and tried to re-import them.

When I re-imported them, there weren't any to import. It said they were already imported. But when I manually scroll back to the first date that should have photos (2015-01-02) I see they are in the folder that I imported, but they're not in my photo library.

I've checked the trash (empty), I don't use hidden photos. I've also restored my photo library (cmd+opt+open app). I've restarted photos/computer and of course googled everything I can think of. I've also checked that they're missing on both my mac & my iphone (same icloud account)

Any tips would be appreciated.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.1

Posted on Jan 1, 2022 10:14 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

jeffmcclelland Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 1, 2022 11:37 PM in response to jeffmcclelland

Ok, fooling around a bit more and had some success!

I tried just re-importing that one example file again and it worked.

Interestingly when I searched again for the date (2015-01-10) after importing it said "indexing..." but then it found two photos including my missing photo.

I then tried what I really wanted, which was add a whole folder of photos. There are 707 photos in the folder but some are definitely already in photos. It found an additional 17 to import.

Then I ran it a third time and it found 635 new ones to import:

I tried a 4th time and it didn't find any to import, which is probably about right.

So maybe it's just a super flaky process, or an index was way out of date. I have no idea. But I think I'll just try re-importing everything multiple times until I get nothing to import.

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Answer 2

Jan 1, 2022 11:27 PM in response to TonyCollinet

Thanks for your response, Tony!

All of the photos were exported from Adobe Lightroom about a year ago.

It's a good idea to check the exif data. For a concrete example, a photo with the filename "2015-01-10 18.00.14.jpg" should be in photos but I can't access it.

Here's what's curious.

I type in '2015-01-10' but don't hit return yet. It shows that it's found 3 photos in the live search dropdown (1st screenshot).
But in the search results, it only finds one photo. If I hit enter on the search it will just show one photo for that date and it's not "2015-01-10 18.00.14.jpg"

If I check the exif data in preview for my missing photo "2015-01-10 18.00.14.jpg" it shows that the photo was indeed taken on 2015-01-10 (2nd screenshot below)

I've also tried just searching in photos for the filename "2015-01-10 18.00.14.jpg" and photos doesn't find anything. I tried searching with quotes, removing the .jpg, etc, but nothing comes back.

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Answer 3

Jan 1, 2022 11:48 AM in response to jeffmcclelland

What was the source of these images.

If photos says it already has them, then most likely it does. Do the photos you are importing have the date set correctly in the photo exif metadata (not the file date).

It is the date in the exif that is used for sorting in Photos, not the file date - so it could be that they are misplaced in the date order within your library. Try doing a search for the filename of one of these, and if it is found, then right click and select "show in all photos"

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Answer 4

Jan 2, 2022 1:19 AM in response to jeffmcclelland

Might also be worth restaring in safe mode, trying then, then restarting normally and trying again.

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Photos are missing but cannot be re-imported

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