Repair the Photos Library on the Mac

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In this video, we’re going to look at how we can rebuild our Photos Library on the Mac. Now, we can only do this on the Mac, we cannot rebuild our Photos Library on the iPad or iPhone. Now why would we want to rebuild it? Well, if your photos app won’t open, maybe it won’t open the library or when it opens it crashes. Instead of restoring a backup, what you can try doing is just rebuilding your photos library, it’s pretty simple to do. And again, we can only do this on the Mac. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go over to my Mac. Now, before you rebuild it, what I always recommend doing is making sure that you have a backup.

So what I would recommend doing is going to your time machine and making sure that it is backed up, you go up to your Apple menu here. And then we go over to our System Preferences. If you use inventory, you can go to settings. And then from here, what we need to do is go to Time Machine, I click on it. And then from here, I can see when my last backup was. So we want to make sure that we have a backup. Now in most cases, when you rebuild your photos library, it doesn’t really cause any issues. And hopefully what it’ll do is it’ll fix it. But it’s always good to do it once you have a backup. So my Time Machine is backing up, I’m good, I have a backup. So that’s one way is by backing up through time machine, you can also go into your photos folder where your Photos Library is I’m going to go to go here, I do need to make sure that I’m in my finder. So I’ll go over to go here.

And then from here, what we do is we go to home. And then under home, we go to pictures. Under pictures, we have my library. So I want to back this up, maybe I do not have a time machine backup or it’s taken too long. And I just want to back it up manually. This is another way of doing it. Well, all I do is just click on it to select it. And then if I Control click on it, hold down the Control key and click, what I’m able to do is duplicate it. So I’ll just duplicate it. And now I have my backup we can see I have a copy. So now what I’m able to do is rebuild my original library.

If something goes wrong, I can always go back over to my copy. So that’s the first thing make sure you have a backup. Alright, so I have a backup. What’s the next step in rebuilding the Photos Library? Well, it’s pretty simple. All you need to do is just go down to your photos app, I have it here in my dock. If it’s in your Applications folder, open up your Applications folder. And instead of opening it up, what you do is you hold down the Command and Option key at the same time when I do that, and then I open up the Photos app. So I have my Command and Option key held down and I click on photos here, what’s going to happen is it’s going to ask me if I want to repair the library.

So that’s basically all we have to do, we just have to hold down the Command and Option keys and then open up the Photos app. So I’m going to repair this asks for my password, it is now repairing it. It’s a small library, it won’t take that long. And there’s my library. So if I was having an issue, hopefully what this did now is resolve all of those issues. If it did resolve all the issues, what you can do is quit out of it. And then go back over to your copy, you no longer need this copy. This was just a temporary copy. What I can do is I can delete it. And now I’m back at just my Photos Library. So that’s how we repair our photos app, our Photos Library. On the Mac.

Again, we can only do this on the Mac. What I recommend doing is making a backup make sure you have a time machine backup or just go to your Photos Library, which is in your pictures folder and duplicate that library. Once you do that, you just hold down the Command and Option key, open up the Photos app and then from there, you can rebuild it. It’s not something that I recommend you do on a regular basis. You basically only want to do this when you’re having an issue. Once you rebuild your library and let’s say it opened up hopefully it will open up. What you can do if you’ve duplicated that library is delete the duplicate, just go back over to your pictures folder and delete that copy. So that’s how we can rebuild our Photos Library or if we’re having an issue with our photos on the Mac.