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Editors' Pick| Nov 10, 2019, 02:04pm EST |

How To Fix A Damaged macOS Photos Library When The Repair Tool Fails

Brad Moon

Reviews and guidance for Apple gear, audio systems and consumer tech.

This article is more than 2 years old.

Last year I wrote a post about fixing a problem that is common enough that Apple provides a tool to address it — a corrupt Photos library. With our family photos gone digital, the prospect of something going wrong with the default app for storing, editing and viewing those images can be a little terrifying. When you see an error when trying to back or copy the Photos library, you know there's trouble. The easy solution is to restore the library from a Time Machine backup. But what if you don't have a backup, or what if there have been multiple photos uploaded to that library since the last backup — photos you don't want to lose?

This is bad news if you're trying to back up your macOS Photos library...

Screen capture by Brad Moon

The first move is to use Apple's Photos library repair tool. I have all the steps needed to do this outlined in this post. Chance are, this will fix your problem. If not (and in my case it failed), there is another option. It's going to take some time, but this is what finally solved my own Photos library corruption issue.

As always, step one is to make a backup of your system, including the Photos library — if possible. From here, I'm going to outline a manual process for locating and removing an image file (or files) at the root of the problem. If you can locate and remove the problematic files, you should be able to run the Photos library repair tool to ensure everything is back in order, and go on your merry way. Here are the steps. Note: this was written based on a Mac running macOS Mojave or High Sierra.

1. Locate the Photos Library (in your Users folder, within the Pictures folder)

Photos Library contains the hidden files that are key to recovery.

Screen capture by Brad Moon

2. CNTRL-click Photo Library and select "Show Package Contents".

3. Open the folder called "Masters." This folder contains your original image files, organized by year.

The Photos Library "Masters" folder holds all your original image files.

Screen capture by Brad Moon

4. Start copying the contents to a new location, one folder at a time. Make certain you are actually copying the folders, not simply moving the originals by holding the Option key when dragging the folder to the new location.

5. If the copy fails, it means it has hit a corrupt image file in the folder — which is likely the problem, or part of the problem (there could be more than one corrupt file). In this case copy failure is a good thing, because we're hoping to find a corrupt file.

6. In the case of copy failure, start again on copying the folder where you ran into the issue, but instead of the entire folder, copy a few files at a time until you find the corrupt one(s). You'll need to manually create a folder in the new location with the exact same name to copy those files into. Skip any corrupt files — but remove them from the original folders— and keep copying.

7. Continue this process until you've copied all the folders from Masters.

8. The damaged image files are likely lost, but may be recoverable with third party tools.

9. Once you have all the files copied, you know they are good.

10. Launch Photos and run the repair tool again.

If the repair tool still fails, you still have all those image files copied to a new location. You can create a new Photos library (hold the Option key when launching Photos and select "Create New," then once in the new Photos library, use "Import" to import the contents of the image file folders you copied. And in a worst case scenario you have full access to the image files so you can freely copy them, back them up, and open them in other applications.

If your Photos library is still corrupted? At this point, I'm afraid I can't help you — it's time to start Googling third party repair and recovery tools...

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Brad Moon

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