My old photos were backed up on a Seagate hard drive. Photos won't allow me to import the library that was stored. It says The library “Photos Library” is in a TimeMachine backup. Open the original library. The original library is on another machine I no longer have. How do I get my old photos back?
iMac 24″, macOS 11.4
Hold down the option key and click on the Time Machine icon in the menu bar.
You'll see an option to browse other backup discs
You should then be able to navigate to your backup on the external drive and recover your library.
As muggy said, you need to restore the library from within the Time Machine app. Enter Time Machine, go to the Pictures folder and go back in time till you see the library you want to restore. Select it and click on the Restore button.
Here's a screenshot/graphical representation of how it's done:
OK I got "Restore" to work and after 20 minutes it said it was done and when I opened Photos the backups were not in the library. Instead, I think it renamed the old library
And when I tried to click on the supposedly restored library, this is what I got
Actually these suggestions didn't work.
I went into the Backup drive via Time Machine and selected the Photos library. It spent some time determining the size of the file. There is a "Cancel" button and a "Restore" button at the bottom. The "Restore" button never activated.
Where did you restore it to?
Got a new iMac and want to bring in some very old photos.
