If you’ve used a new Apple app before, you know that a bug (or three) are fairly common. When this happens, the Apple community at large rises up and makes the bugs known by assaulting the support section on Apple.com with fiery posts or, if it’s really bad, they take to the phone lines. Apple’s engineers then spring into action and fix the problem(s), and a few weeks later the Mac App Store notifies you of a software update. That’s just how it goes with new apps. (Of course, there’s no excuse for a company to release bug-riddled software, but that’s never really been the case with Apple. Aside from a few glitches here and there, Apple software is solid.)

The big takeaway here is to always use the latest version of Photos. That’s it. If the Mac App Store notifies you of an update, for Thor’s sake, save yourself some stress and install it. If you’re not sure whether you’re running the latest version, choose →App Store and, in the Mac App Store window that opens, click the Updates tab. If you see a Photos update, click Update. Doing so may fix whatever the trouble you’re experiencing.

Overall, most people report a smooth upgrade process from iPhoto or Aperture to Photos—aside from grieving over the loss of some features, that is. But if “overall” means “everyone but you,” this section has suggestions for dealing with a library that stubbornly refuses to open or upgrade, and tells you why Photos won’t let you see some of the stuff you had in those other libraries.

Should I remove duplicate images from iPhoto or Aperture before I upgrade to Photos?

No. Photos is smart enough not to import multiple copies of a picture or video. Even if you combine Photos libraries using the technique on Merging Libraries, duplicates shouldn’t appear. But if you insist upon tidying up your iPhoto or Aperture library, check out the $8 Duplicate Annihilator for iPhoto (www.brattoo.com/propaganda). They also have an $8 version for Photos, in case you accidentally import duplicates later on.

Photos says it’s unable to upgrade my photo library. Why?

If this happens, there may be locked files somewhere inside your iPhoto or Aperture library. If something’s somehow gotten locked, Photos can’t convert it to the latest format in order to open it.

Rather than trying to find the locked needle in a haystack, you can use a Unix command in your Mac’s Terminal app to unlock your files. Yes, this is scary territory, but as long as you’re careful and type the commands exactly as they’re listed below, everything will be just fine (better than fine, actually, because Photos will be able to open your library!).

First, make sure you’re logged into your Mac as an administrator (see https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18891 for help on that). Next, open your Applications→Utilities folder, and then double-click Terminal. The resulting command console may look completely alien, but just take a deep breath and type the following, exactly as it appears here:

sudo chflags -R nouchg

—and add a space at the end (after “nouchg”). Don’t press Return yet!

Switch to the Finder. Open your Pictures folder and drag the offending iPhoto or Aperture library icon into the Terminal window to add its directory to the command you just entered. You now see a command that looks something like this:

sudo chflags -R nouchg /Users/Spock/Pictures/iPhoto Library/

Press Return to run the command. When prompted, enter your Mac’s password, and then press Return again. Now try using Photos to open your old library again; it should open right up without a hitch.

Photos says I don’t have enough storage space on my Mac to import my iPhoto or Aperture library, but I have plenty!

Unfortunately, Spotlight—OS X’s search feature—has been known to calculate available storage space incorrectly, leading Photos to refuse to upgrade an iPhoto or Aperture library. Don’t panic; the problem is easy to fix.

To perform your own storage-space check, open a Finder window and choose View→Show Status Bar. At the bottom of the Finder window, you see a line of text that tells you how much free space you have on your hard drive. Next, choose →About This Mac and click the Storage tab. If the amount of free space shown there doesn’t match what the Finder window indicates, try resetting Spotlight. To do that, choose →System Preferences→Spotlight. In the Spotlight preference pane, click the Privacy tab, and then drag the hard drive icon from your Mac’s desktop into its list. (If you don’t see a hard drive icon on your desktop, click the + icon at lower left of Spotlight’s preference pane and in the resulting pane, select your hard drive and click Choose. In the confirmation message that appears, click OK.) This disables indexing for that drive.

Hopefully, Photos will now agree to import your iPhoto or Aperture library. When Photos is finished doing that, go back to the Spotlight preference pane, click Privacy, and then select your hard drive in the list. Click the - icon at lower left to remove your hard drive from the Privacy list, and Spotlight resumes indexing the drive’s content.

If you really do lack hard drive space, then you’ve got a great excuse to go shopping for a bigger hard drive. If you’ve got the money, spring for a solid-state drive (SSD)—they’re a lot faster than their spinning-platter brethren, as the Note on Note explains.

After upgrading to Photos, some items have a gray, black, or empty thumbnail preview. What happened?

This particular problem has several possible causes:

Figure A-1. When you see this sheet, click Repair, and then enter your Mac’s password when prompted. It takes a little while for Photos to repair your library, so feel free to vacuum or wash your hair while it does its thing.

iPhoto disappeared after I upgraded to Photos and I want to open my old iPhoto library in iPhoto. What can I do?

Don’t panic—you can use the Mac App Store to download iPhoto. Choose →App Store, and then click the Purchases tab. Scroll down until you see iPhoto. If there’s a button labeled Install, click it. If the button says Open, click it and, if iPhoto launches successfully, it’s still available to use. If iPhoto refuses to launch, locate it in your Applications folder, put it in the Finder’s trash, and then empty the trash. Next, Quit and relaunch the App Store, click the Purchases tab, and then scroll down to iPhoto. Now the button should say Install. Click it and your Mac downloads the latest OS X Yosemite-compatible version of iPhoto.

Unfortunately, this technique won’t work if you never downloaded or upgraded iPhoto using the Mac App Store. If your Mac is older than 2011 and you never upgraded iPhoto using Software Update or the Mac App Store, you may need to find an iPhoto installer on a DVD and install it from there. Once you’ve done that, the technique described above should work to update it to the current, Yosemite-friendly version. Alternatively, if you have another Mac that uses your same Apple ID, you can drag its copy of iPhoto onto a removable storage device such as a flash drive or external hard drive, and then copy iPhoto from that device into the Applications folder on your Mac. Just be sure to update iPhoto to the latest version before copying it to the removable storage device. Or, if you have an Apple store nearby, you can pack up your Mac and beg the wizards at the Genius Bar to install a functioning copy of iPhoto for you.

I upgraded to Photos and I want to open my old iPhoto library in iPhoto, but iPhoto won’t launch. What can I do?

You need to delete and reinstall iPhoto as explained in the previous section.

I tried updating iPhoto to the newest version after I upgraded to Photos, but the App Store’s Update button doesn’t seem to work. What can I do?

Unfortunately, you need to delete and reinstall iPhoto as explained two sections ago.

The file size of the Photos app is a fraction of the size of the iPhoto app. Is Photos that much more efficient than iPhoto, or is it because there are fewer features?

You’re right, the file size of the two apps is vastly different: 1,700 million bytes for iPhoto versus 50 million bytes for Photos. This is likely due to a combination of efficiency and fewer features.

The plug-ins I used in iPhoto don’t work in Photos, and I can’t use my external editor. Am I destined to a life of Photos-imposed limitations?

Your pain is shared by thousands of formerly happy plug-in and external editor users. While Apple hinted that Photos would support plug-ins, it hasn’t happened as of this writing. But keep your eyes peeled for a Photos updates that allows plug-ins, as Apple may add that feature soon.

As for external editors, there’s a (clunky) workaround: You can export images from Photos, edit them in another program, and then import the edited version back into Photos. While it’s not as seamless as iPhoto’s ability to simply hand images off to other programs when you click the Edit button, it still works. Here again, keep your fingers crossed that Apple adds this ability in future versions of Photos.

Photos doesn’t recognize my camera. What do I do?

Photos generally works with any recent camera model, including iOS devices. If you don’t see the Import screen (Chapter 3) even though the camera is connected, try the following steps in order:

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Photos is good at keeping track of all your images, but occasionally problems crop up. Here are some of the most common ones related to organizing your goodies.

I want to delete a picture but Photos won’t let me.

You may be trying to use the Delete key on your keyboard to delete a picture in a smart album, which you can’t do. The fix is to Control-click the thumbnail, and then choose “Delete 1 Photo” from the shortcut menu that appears.

I deleted a photo, but it came back!

That’s doubtful. You probably removed the image from an album or project instead of deleting it from your library. As Removing Files from an Album describes, pictures and videos in albums and projects are merely aliases that point to the actual files in your library. Removing a thumbnail from an album or project doesn’t affect the original file. If you really want to delete an item from your library while you’re viewing its thumbnail in an album or project, Control-click the thumbnail and choose “Delete 1 Photo” from the shortcut menu.

When I delete a photo from my library and then switch to a slideshow that used that image, the photo is still in the Photos drawer at the bottom of the window.

As of this writing, this is a real, live bug. Although the thumbnail is visible in the Photos drawer, it doesn’t appear in the slideshow when you play it. But if seeing the image in the Photos drawer bugs you, close the slideshow project and then reopen it; the rogue thumbnail should be gone. If not, then let’s hope that Apple fixes this in the next Photos update.

I created a new album but don’t see it in Photos’ sidebar or in Albums view.

As Using Folders explains, Photos lets you stash albums into folders in order to organize them. It’s likely that your new album ended up inside a folder. If a folder is selected in the sidebar or in Albums view when you create an album—or a folder, for that matter—then the new album or folder lands inside the selected folder. To get it out of the folder, double-click the folder to open it, and then Control-click the album’s icon. Choose “Move Album Out Of [folder name]” and the album appears as an icon in Albums view just like the others.

Faces isn’t correctly identifying the people in my pictures.

The Faces feature merely wants your attention. By following the instructions on Tagging Faces, you can train Photos and greatly improve its facial-recognition accuracy. By telling Faces when it’s right and wrong, it gets better at identifying the people in your photographic life.

One of my photos isn’t with the others I took at the same time.

If you upgraded your iPhoto or Aperture library, some items may not appear in their correct chronological order in the All Photos album. As of this writing, the problem appears to be a bug. If you want to ensure you’re seeing all your pictures and videos taken within a specific timeframe, switch from Albums view to Photos view, and then find the date you’re looking for using Moments, Collections, or Years view.

When I’m in an album and choose View→Keep Sorted By Date, I can still reorder the items. What gives?

In an album, you can drag photos into an arbitrary order, or choose View→Keep Sorted By Date to revert to the oldest-to-newest order. Even then, you can drag photos into any order, so the word “Keep” in the name of that command is misleading. Apparently in Apple’s world “Keep Sorted” means “Temporarily Sort.”

Items that I added location tags to in iPhoto don’t have them in Photos. What happened?

While some people experienced the loss of any manually added locations tags, most didn’t. Happily, you can always add a location tag using the Info panel (see Adding Location Tags).

Photos offers many methods for sharing and syncing your digital goodies (see Chapter 8), including a few methods that were adopted from iPhoto. Here are a few problems you may run into in Photos’ sharing and syncing realm.

Where’s the export-to-web-page option in Photos? I used it in iPhoto all the time.

While Photos doesn’t have a feature like the one in iPhoto, you can create a web gallery in Photos by setting up a Shared album and then turning on its Public Website option. Publishing a Shared Album on the Web has the scoop.

I turned on iCloud Photo Library three days ago, and it’s still uploading files to Apple’s server. My other Internet activity has slowed to a crawl, and now my Internet service provider is threatening to pull the plug on me because I’m using too much bandwidth. Can I slow down the data transfer so I don’t get slammed with extra charges or receive slower service from my ISP?

This is an ugly problem indeed, and one that Apple really needs to fix. When Photos first syncs with iCloud, it tries to do so immediately and as quickly as possible. As you noticed, this can slow your other Internet usage to a crawl. You can turn the process off and on in Photos’ iCloud Preferences or pause it for one day (iCloud Photo Library). Ideally, your Mac should sense when you’re using it and throttle down the upload speed, but Apple doesn’t offer this feature (yet!).

iCloud Photo Library ruined My Photo Stream, and now I can’t see it on my Mac.

The most important thing to remember about iCloud Photo Library is that if you turn it on on one device, you need to do so on all your devices. Otherwise, you won’t see photos from one device on the other. To turn iCloud Photo Library or My Photo Stream on or off on your iOS device, tap Settings, and then scroll down to Photos & Camera and tap it. iCloud Photo Library has details.

My Photo Stream isn’t syncing!

My Photo Stream only syncs across your devices when you’re on a WiFi connection; it doesn’t work over a cellular network. You can also encounter syncing problems if the Camera app is open on your iOS device—you have to close it before pictures will upload to iCloud. Or you may just have a low battery: If your iOS device has less than 50% power left and isn’t plugged into a power outlet, the syncing comes to a screeching halt.

I’ve got iCloud Photo Library turned on, but the changes I make in Photos for Mac aren’t showing up in Photos for iOS (or vice versa).

Depending on how many changes you make or pictures you take, it may take awhile for all that to be reflected on the other device. If nothing happens for a really long time, make sure your iOS device has WiFi turned on and that it’s connected to the same network as your Mac. If that doesn’t do the trick, try the following:

A little patience goes a long way when dealing with iCloud Photo Library; though if it still seems stuck, try signing out of and back into your iCloud account on each device.

Multiple users (accounts) in my family shared the same iPhoto library on our shared Mac. But I can’t seem to let multiple users share one Photos library. Is there a way to do that?

Alas, no. The ability to share a library is a casualty of Apple’s introducing iCloud Photo Library, and it’s not a feature that’s likely to return. Photos’ concept of a library is one per user. That way, you can have all your pictures and videos available to you on all your devices—not everyone else’s photos. The solution is to set up a Family Group, as explained on Family Sharing, and then use the Shared Family Album. The box on Got PICTs? has more on using Photos in a family situation.

I stored my Photos library on a network drive and now I can’t use iCloud Photo Library to sync my photos with my iOS devices.

To use iCloud Photo Library, the drive you’re using on your network must be in Mac OS Extended format, also known as HFS+. (Photos’ method of keeping track of your stuff requires complex file-management features that aren’t in other formats.) There are two solutions to this problem: You can buy a Mac-formatted network drive and then copy your Photos library to it, or you can back up your library to another storage device and reformat your network drive to Mac OS Extended format. To erase and reformat your drive, make triple sure your files are backed up on another drive (just to be safe), and then launch Disk Utility; it’s in your Applications→Utilities folder. Choose your drive from the list on the left, and then click the Erase tab on the right. Finally, from the Format menu, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and then click Erase.

Before upgrading to Photos, I created albums in iPhoto and then used iTunes to copy some of them to my iPad. After upgrading to Photos, this is no longer an option in iTunes. Can I continue using my old approach, or do I need to do something different?

You can continue with your old habit if you wish. The thing to remember is that if iCloud Photo Library is turned on on your iOS device(s) and your Mac, iCloud Photo Library takes over all photo-syncing duties so you can see all your Photos albums on your iOS device—not just the albums you pick in iTunes. To continue using iTunes to sync only selected albums to your iOS device, turn off iCloud Photo Library on the iOS device. To do that, tap Settings, scroll to Photos & Camera, tap it, and then on the resulting screen, make sure the iCloud Photo Library button is white (off) not green (on). If it’s green, tap it to turn it white. You should then be able to synchronize albums using iTunes as you always have. For more on iCloud Photo Library, see Meet the iCloud Photo Library and 19.

I’m using Photos on two Macs, and accessing the same library on both. Why don’t I see my projects or Faces on the second Mac?

While you can sign into iCloud on the second Mac using the same Apple ID you use on your primary Mac, Photos limits what’s available to you on the second Mac. After you sign in, the following items appear in the Photos app on all of your Macs (see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204486 for details): All original photos and videos, all folders and albums, smart albums, keywords, searchable keywords based on Faces tags, and key photo selections.

The following goodies are available only on the Mac on which they were created: Books, cards, and calendars; slideshows; keyword shortcuts; unused keywords; the Last Import album (this album contains photos you most recently imported on that specific Mac); and Faces tags and Faces data.

In addition, your pictures and videos need to be stored inside the Photos library for them to be accessible through iCloud Photo Library. See Copied vs. Referenced photos for more on copying items into your Photos library versus referencing them externally.

Help! iCloud Photo Library doesn’t work and also, I can’t view images on my AppleTV!

As explained on What Gets Uploaded, both iCloud Photo Library and the AppleTV work with the System Photo Library only.

Fortunately, there’s not a whole lot that can go wrong when you’re editing images or videos in Photos. After all, you can always revert to the original version. Nevertheless, here are a few problems and their solutions.

I messed up a picture while editing it, and now it’s ruined!

Open the offending thumbnail in Edit mode (Editing Basics), and then click “Revert to Original” at the upper right, or choose Image→“Revert to Original.” Photos restores your image to its original state, using a backup it keeps squirreled away in its library (Dealing With Duplicates).

Photos crashes when I double-click a thumbnail to edit it.

The culprit here is usually a referenced file that you changed the name of in the Finder. For example, if you imported the file as a referenced file (Copied vs. Referenced photos) instead of letting Photos copy it into its library, and then you changed the name of the file in your Mac’s Finder, Photos won’t be able to find the file anymore. Alternatively, the file may have gotten corrupted somehow. Either way, the solution is to delete the file in Photos (Deleting Pictures and Videos), and then reimport it.

If the problem persists—and you’ve kept your paws off the file’s name in the Finder—try opening it in Preview (it’s in your Applications folder) and then using its File→Save As command to create a new version of the file that you import into Photos.

Most printing problems have to do with your printer itself, in which case turning it off and back on solves most troubles. However, there are a few settings in Photos that can frustrate you and waste precious paper and ink.

I can’t print more than one picture per page and it’s awfully wasteful to use a whole sheet of paper for one little 4 x 6-inch print.

Agreed. Photos is perfectly happy to put multiple pictures onto a single page, so try the following fixes:

My picture doesn’t fit properly on 4 x 6-, 5 x 7-, or 8 x 10-inch paper.

As you learned in the box on When Aspect Ratios Collide, most digital cameras produce photos in a 4:3 width-to-height ratio, which means they don’t quite fit standard print sizes. The fix is to crop your images to the appropriate aspect ratio (How to Crop, Straighten, and Flip a Photo), or use the zoom slider in the Print pane to change the crop just before you hit print (Printing from Photos tells you how).

Last but not least, here’s a handful of miscellaneous problems.

If I’m using iCloud Photo Library, do I need to back up my Photos library elsewhere?

Absolutely! Things go wrong, even on Apple’s servers. Apple recommends that if you use iCloud Photo Library, you should also use Time Machine to back up your Mac, which includes your Photos library. Be sure to keep your Photos library and Time Machine backups on different disks, too, so that when that disk fails—and it will—you won’t lose everything. Just keep your Photos library in your Pictures folder and set Time Machine to back up to an external drive, to a disk on your network, or to a Time Capsule.

See the box on A Super-Awesome Backup Strategy for a simple backup strategy.

All my pictures are gone and I’m freaking out!

or

The library starts to open but it never does and I’m freaking out!

You have just two options when these extreme problems occur: You can repair the library or replace it with a backup copy. (You might think that you could use iCloud Photo Library to restore a library file, but that would take forever.) Here’s how:

Once you find the backup from which you want to restore your Photos Library file, select that Finder window, and then click Restore beneath the Finder window stack. The OS X desktop reappears and asks if you want to replace your current version of the file with the recovered version or keep both versions. Choose Replace and your troubles should be over.