Recovering photos from my old external drive if it’s no longer recognized by iMac

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Level 1

4 points

Recovering photos from my old external drive if it’s no longer recognized by iMac

I was using an external hard drive for all my Time Machine backups and apparently my photos. I don't even know how the photos were saved there, but my external drive was getting old so I purchased a new one and with both connected, did a new back up. Shortly after my original external drive no longer would work. I tried to access my photos and it said "Photos cannot find library "photos library.photoslibary" This library was last found on a drive named "Backup". Please attach that drive and click "Try Again". I thought when my iMac backed up to my new Time Machine backup it would back up everything but now I cannot access my pictures. I don't know what to do. My grandfather just passed away and I am trying to access pictures of him. Even if I get my old hard drive transferred to my new external drive, how am I supposed to acmes my pictures if it is only being associated with my old "backup"? Please help.

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Photo Cannot Be Located

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 9, 2025 07:49 PM

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Answer 1

markwmsn

Level 6

16,613 points

Jul 9, 2025 09:03 PM in response to polyhart

If you don't know how your photo library got on that old external drive with your Time Machine backups, it isn't clear how we can figure out how that happened. Any guesses would only be speculations.

Did somebody help you set up that external drive? Maybe they can help you revive it long enough to rescue the photo library (and any other critical files they may have placed there) to another new external drive. (Time Machine and Photos library should not be on the same physical disk.)

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Answer 2

Camelot

Level 9

57,873 points

Jul 10, 2025 10:01 AM in response to polyhart

There's much to unpack here.

First, it's entirely possible to have your iPhotos Library on an external drive. Not common, and not the default, but it is doable. The danger you face now is that the external drive you were using has failed. Assuming it's failed hard and there's no chance of recovering data off that drive, the question is whether there's any other backup.

Now, the danger of using the same drive for your data as you use for your Time Machine backups is risky. For obvious reasons, Time Machine won't backup the drive that its storing the backups on (otherwise you'd have an infinite loop of backups backing up a backup of every backup...) As such, it's possible (likely?) that your photos were never included in your Time Machine backup. Now that's a real problem.

The best chance you have is that you had iCloud Photos turned on and that your system was backing up your photos to iCloud. In that case you can be less concerned about the copy of the photos on your (failed) external drive and can just restore them from iCloud.

So the big question right now is: Did you have iCloud Photos turned on?

Can you view your photos from another device connected to your Apple Account (e.g. iPhone, iPad, etc.?)

Can you go to iCloud.com/photos and see your photos there?

If so, we just need to tell your iMac to forget the external Photos Library and start a new one, populated with the images from iCloud.

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