Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

dlegend

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 11, 2009
263
0
DC
I've been having a lot of issues using Photos on my 2019 Macbook Air and pretty much have been since I've bought it. I have a 50k picture, 300+GB Photos library on a Western Digital 4TB portable hard drive. Twice since November the hard drive has eventually stopped mounting to my Macbook Air or a Mac Mini I still have. Both times I've ended up having to reformat the drive and restore it from Time Machine.

My issues:
  1. The Photos app is slow to respond on the Macbook, especially deleting a photo. I'll click yes to delete and the photo stays for minutes. I was having a similar issue with the Mac Mini which is part of the reason why I bought a new Macbook. Ironically, using the external now on the Mac Mini seems to let me delete pictures quicker the the new Macbook.
  2. Usually after I've opened Photos, closed Photos, and tried to eject the hard drive I get an error message saying it's still in use. I've looked in the Activity Monitor and don't see the photoslib in the list of tasks. I'm not sure what's holding it up. Logging out seems to help it, but that's not ideal
  3. Exporting pictures from Photos to Snapfish has been awful, rarely working usually making me want to throw the computer out the window. After failing to export 130 photos 3 times over an hour and half on the Macbook, I just hooked up the external to Mac Mini and it exported them in a couple minutes. Also when I can't select the photos through the Snapfish website, I have to drag/drop them in.
  4. I will occasionally get a pop-up when I go to open Photos on the macbook that says the computer doesn't have approval to open the Photos library.
Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix these issues? Apple wasn't much support. I'm trying to get this working again so I can get the last 4 months of pictures up and then start clearing out the bad pictures to shrink the library size down. I would like to use a NAS or the old Mac Mini as a server but that will be the next issue.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.