Photos for Mac - Consolidate not working

Hi Old Toad, thanks for chiming in!

>Are you able to select a photo and use the File ➙ Show Referenced File in Finder menu option?

Yes

>Have you tried doing about 100 photos only?

Initially tried consolidating just under 18 K pictures. A little over 2K pictures were consolidated with no problems. Of the 15k or so remaining referenced ones, I have tried 1 at a time, a few at a time, about 100 at a time, or all at once. None of these approaches work.

>Where are the referenced files located?

All the referenced files are in the ~/Pictures/Originals folder. Within that folder they are in subfolders by:

YYYY/MM/Activity name/yyyy mm Activity name 01.JPG (in sequence augmenting counter no. 02 ... to nn.JPG)

So they are in the same folder ~/Pictures as the "Phots Library" library.

I have used the Apple Mac Photos library repair tool on the library with no issues noted/reported. I have also run external tools on the library to make sure there is not a single referenced picture in the Photos library that does not correctly point to the appropriate file on the "Originals" folder described above.

I even tried installing a copy of the "Originals folder. and a copy of the Apple Mac Photos library on a newly configured MacBook Air I own and I see the same behavior (no pictures get consolidated). For what it's worth my main Mac is an M1 Mac mini and the MacBook Air is an M2.

>Were the referenced image files always in that location or did you move them there from where they were originally?

Years ago, when I was using Apple Aperture, the originals were moved to their current location in the ~/Pictures/Originals folder. When I imported the library into Photos, I had many problems with the application being unable to find the original files. It took me a lot of time and effort to get the Photos library to be able to find every single referenced picture.

I do suspect there may be some inconsistencies at the MySQL database layer that the Photos repair tool has not been able to correct. I have not been able to find any tools that might help me explore this further and I am hesitant to go change anything at the database layer as I'm not familiar with MySQL and don't want to risk totally mucking up the Photos library.

I think the Photos software is being slowly improved over time. A few months ago, on earlier Photos versions, any attempt to consolidate reference pictures into the Photos library resulted in the application crashing. This is no longer happening.

>Did you consolidate the one file you could find in the Finder?

I can find each and every referenced file at this time but have been unable to consolidate any of them.