Photos Cannot Find The System Photo Library Mac

Summary: This article includes best Mac photo recovery solutions which can help you recover missing iPhoto/Photos pictures after macOS update or any other photo recovery situations.

By Katrina | Posted to Home > Mac Data Recovery Tips, updated on Mar.26th, 2019 |

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Nowadays, many of us don't have physical photo albums like we did decades ago, as everything is now digital and is stored online or on our computers and smart devices. Photographs and images aren't just there to entertain us, they're there to record history. Many of life's greatest moments are captured on camera from a fantastic holiday abroad, to a child's first steps. If anything were to happen to these images, we would feel as if we'd lost a part of ourselves.

Sadly, some people unfortunately lose important images thanks to modern technology, which is what we're looking at today. Losing iPhoto images is tough, but there is a solution in the form of deleted photo recovery software, and we're going to share that solution with you today.

Note: Since OS X Yosemite 10.10.3, the photo library app iPhoto has been replaced with Photos.

Common problems

  1. Why my Photos library not showing in iTunes? If you have ever moved your library to another folder, iTunes might not be able to find Photos library. Then, you just need to create an alias of the photo library, move it to the Pictures folder, and rename it to 'Photos Library', and iTunes will now be able to find it.
  2. At the top of the section Applications using iCloud find Photos. Next, move the iCloud Photo Library slider to the active position. Do the same with the Upload to Photo Stream slider. Now all photos from iPhone can be synchronized with all your other devices. On the Mac, go to the Apple menu. Next, go to System.
  3. Type in something different if you know you've changed the name of your library file to something else. Look all over your computer’s drive and external drives to see if you can locate it. I find that after typing in “iPhoto Library”, then click on “Show all in Finder” works best.

First up, we're going to share a few common photo recovery problems that our customers have encountered, before giving you a solution. Here is a recent email that we received from a concerned customer who feared that they'd lost close to 2000 iPhoto images.

Hey guys, I hope you can help as I'm desperate. I had around 1,900 iPhoto photographs saved. While some of these were boring images I hadn't gotten around to erasing yet, many of them were images of my son as a baby. In these images, I could swipe through and literally watch him grow older right before my eyes. Now I can't find them anywhere. After I upgraded to Mojave/High Sierra I only had 224 photos left, and could not find them anywhere. Worst of all is that the ones I do have left are typically the ones that I would quite happily have deleted if I'd thought to do so. They're also not on the cloud as that was the first place I checked. The images have gone from all of my devices, and I'm at my wits' end.

I was reading up on your recent guide to recover deleted photos and came across your site. I hope you can help? I've also been reading up about High Sierra upgrades and it seems as if this is a fairly-common problem as well. If you can help me get these images back I will be eternally grateful to you.

As you can see, the customer in question was clearly distressed as she was emotionally attached to the images that just randomly decided to disappear after she upgraded to macOS High Sierra. High Sierra upgrading is common because it is one of the most widely installed Mac operating systems at present. The problem is that it comes with some pretty significant changes. These changes don't seem to be going down too well with Mac devices, or Mac users for that matter. This is because many Mac users have sadly lost their videos, images, and other important documents after upgrading to macOS High Sierra. Missing iPhoto images is a particularly common problem, which is why we're looking at deleted photo recovery in today's article. The aim of this article is to help you retrieve your iPhoto images after upgrading to Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra.

What is High Sierra?

First, we'll take a quick look at what High Sierra is. macOS High Sierra is the 13th Operating System for the Apple Macintosh computer. It was released back in late 2017 and was named after the High Sierra region of California. As beneficial as High Sierra was, the main issue that Mac users had was the fact that, after upgrading from macOS Sierra, many users found that their iPhotos were randomly going missing from their iPhoto photo libraries for no obvious reasons.

Deleted photo recovery solutions

If your iPhotos have done the disappearing act on you after you upgraded, and you aren't quite sure why, try any of the following solutions and with any luck, your photos should be back in your iPhoto library in no time at all.

Solution 1: Recover missing iPhoto pictures from Time Machine

The first photo recovery solution we're going to talk to you about today involves the use of Time Machine. No, we're not talking about the use of an actual time machine, although that would sure come in handy. No, the time machine we're talking about today is the Time Machine backup. You see, if you created a backup via Time Machine before you upgraded to Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra, you can simply use Time Machine restore missing or deleted data including documents and iPhoto images. Here's a step by step rundown of how to do precisely this:

Step 1: Connect the backup drive to the Mac computer.

Step 2: Open iPhoto folder.

Step 3: Click the Time Machine icon in the top left menu bar and select Enter Time Machine.

Tips: Did you know how to show Time Machine icon on the menu bar?

  1. Click Apple icon at the top-right corner.
  2. Select System Preferences… and then click on Time Machine.
  3. Check Show Time Machine in menu bar.

Step 4: Browse the items in the backup folder by using on screen up/down arrows or using the timeline at the edge of the screen. If you want to find files of older version, using timeline to navigate the files is faster. You will be able to see a lot of snapshots of this whole folder and how the folder changes.

Step 5: Select an item and prese Space bar or double-click it to preview it.

Library

Can't Find Photos Library On Mac

Step 6: Select the photo you want to restore, and then click Restore.

Solution 2: Switch from iPhoto to photos

Next up, we're going to quickly walk you through how you can switch from iphoto iPhoto to Photos. You see, on the newer operating systems, the photos Photos app has been updated to have many more features that the iPhoto app doesn't have. Any changes that happen to be made in iPhotos won't be included in photosPhotos, and vice-versa. If you can't find the images you want in the iPhotos library, quit the application and open up the photos Photos library instead. To do so, just follow the upcoming steps:

  • First, quit iPhotos
  • Next, hold down the 'Options' key and then select 'Photos'
  • Now, select the library that you wish to open and click 'Choose library'
  • If you can't find the library that you're looking for, click 'Other library' navigate to the library you require and then click 'Open'
  • With any luck, the images that you thought were gone forever will instead be found here.

    Solution 3: Enjoy recently deleted photo recovery with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

    If the other two solutions haven't provided you with any real luck, it's time for you to break out your secret weapon. When it comes to deleted photo recovery software, if the other solutions haven't restored your precious images, iBoysoft Data Recovery Software for Mac is your last chance. It has been generating a lot of positive feedback lately, and as more and more people discover how effective it really is, this number is only going to grow.

    iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is professional data recovery software that is very effective for recovering lost iPhoto images after upgrading to Mojave/High Sierra. Whether you're looking to retrieve images, videos, audio files, texts, documents, or anything else, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is surely your best chance, especially in the absence of a successful backup. Best of all is the fact that using this piece of software is incredibly easy, and can be achieved, literally, with a few clicks. Here is a step by step guide on how to recover lost iPhoto pictures after upgrading to Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra.

    Step 1: Free download, install, and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software. This software is completely free to download, and can be installed and launched in a matter of seconds.

    Step 2: Once you've downloaded and launched the free online deleted photo recovery software, your next step is to select the drive/partition in which the photos went missing. Now click ‘next' in order to scan for any lost files located on the drive/partition. This process should not take very long at all.

    Step 3: Now it's time for you to preview the initial scanning results. Preview the scan results to see which photos you wish to recover. Once you see the images you wish to recover, you simply click on the ‘recover' Recover' button.

    More about iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

    There are countless examples of free Mac data recovery pieces of software out there for you to choose from, but some are unfortunately not very reliable, nor are they that effective. Finding a reliable and trustworthy piece of free data recovery software is essential, which is why iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac comes so very highly recommended. It is considered by a number of users to be the absolute best free data recovery software option on the market today. This software is ideal, in that it supports the recovery of deleted photos, videos, documents, emails and music files and much more.

    These can be recovered from external hard drives including: USB drives, SD cards, memory cards, pen drives, and more. What's more, the software is even able to recover lost data from APFS formatted SD cards, corrupt SD cards, unmountable SD cards, inaccessible external hard drives on various MAC models, and much more besides. It is simple to use, very effective, and best of all is the fact that the software can be downloaded and installed completely free.

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    Why should you choose iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac?

    There are many benefits associated with utilizing iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software. While we won't list each benefit, we are going to look at some of the main reasons why so many users all over the globe are choosing iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac as their go-to photo recovery application.

    It supports APFS drive data recovery

    The

    One of the main reasons why iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is proving to be so popular is because of the fact that it supports APFS drive data recovery. In fact, many consider it to be the best APFS drive data recovery software because it enables users to recovery Time Machine backups from APFS disks. Not only that, it also allows us to retrieve any lost data which we may have incurred, after deleting an APFS container. In fact, as far as APFS drive data recovery goes, there's plenty of options. These include:

    • Recover lost data from encrypted APFS drive
    • Recover lost data from formatted APFS drive
    • Recover lost data from unmountable APFS drive
    • Recover lost data from inaccessible APFS drive
    • Recover lost data from APFS Volume
    • And more...

    Preview recovered data

    Another benefit of this particular data recovery software is the fact that it enables users to preview recovered data before they decide whether they wish to permanently restore it as it once was. This is useful because it allows users to preview all unique file formats supported by Apple. These include: image, audio, video and file. This is useful because it helps save time and ensures that you don't accidentally restore the wrong files by mistake.

    Deep scan and quick scan modes

    Photos Cannot Find The System Photo Library Mac Os

    The third benefit of this particular piece of data recovery software is the fact that it provides users with both: a deep scan mode, and a quick scan mode, allowing them to save time, or to search deep within the Mac device for the data that they happen to be searching for.

    Photos Cannot Find The System Photo Library Macbook

    Highly compatible

    Finally, the last benefit of iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac software that we're going to be looking at today, is the fact that it is so highly compatible. As well as being able to recover lost data from the APFS drive, it will also recover lost data from:

    • File systems: APFS, encrypted APFS, HFS+, FAT32, exFAT
    • Storage devices: hard drives, external hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, etc.
    • Mac operating systems: macOS 10.14, 10.13, 10.12, 10.11,10.10, 10.9, 10.8, 10.7

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