How to restore photos after downgrading from Sonoma to Ventura?

Could you go forward to macOS 15 Sequoia instead of backward to macOS Ventura? Is you iMac compatible? How to upgrade to macOS Sequoia - Apple Support. My MacBook Pro from 2019 is running more stable on macOS 15 than on macOS 14.

It would save you a lot of work, if you could get your Photos Library into iCloud, at least for a short time, so you can downgrade again, if need be.

Create a new library and let it sync with the iCloud Photo Library.

The Photos.app on Ventura cannot work with a Photos Library that has been upgraded to a newer system version. Do you still have a backup your Photos Library from the time before you upgraded to Sonoma? if yes, you could start from that backup copy to save your albums and need only to reimport the missing photos you added after the Sonoma upgrade.

But if you have been using iCloud Photos and your Photos library is already in iCloud, downloading a fresh copy by syncing with a new, empty Photos Library as recommended by Yer_Man will be your best option. When we are using iCloud Photos, and we have to enable iCloud Photos again for our Photos Library after iCloud got disabled because we had to restore our Mac, it is much slower to enable iCloud Photos for the existing library than to start over with a new library. Enabling iCloud Photos for a large, existing library will cause a new upload into iCloud, which may take several days or even more than a week to complete. Just downloading to a new, empty library will be much faster.

It might be better to address the issues that made Sonoma throw tantrums on your iMac, rather than going backward. In many cases early releases of OSs have had glitches from their many new features, but those are fixed as user experience expands. Most experienced users don't have problems with Sonoma or Sequoia-- I can't remember that last time I reset the PRAM on my Mac. It may be that you can now re-install Sonoma with more success.

the classic library compatibility issue when downgrading macOS versions. Here's what I'd suggest:

1. First, check if your Photos Library still exists in ~/Pictures/ - it may just be incompatible with Ventura's Photos app. Try holding Option while launching Photos to select the library.
2. If that fails, you might need to rebuild the database. Before doing anything drastic:

• Make a full backup of your current .photoslibrary bundle
• Right-click it and select "Show Package Contents"
• The originals should be in "Masters" or "Originals" folder

1. For a more automated solution, I've had success with 4DDiG Photo Repair when dealing with corrupted photo libraries after OS changes. It can extract both the original RAW files and reconstruct album structures from damaged libraries.
2. As a last resort, if you have a Time Machine backup from your Sonoma days, you could selectively restore just the Photos Library database file (not the whole library) to maintain your albums.

Pro tip: In the future, always export an XML backup (File > Export) before major OS changes!

Then it would be worth a try with your Time Machine backup. I would restore just the library from a date, when you had still Ventura running on your Mac(don't overwrite your current library, you may need it).

Good Luck.

baggafluff wrote:

After my experiences with Somoma, I'm nervous about upgrading to Sequoia. I've been using iMacs for over 25 years and I would buy a new one if they released a model with some guts. The highest spec Silicon iMac on the market only has 32GB RAM, which is half what my 2019 Intel iMac is packing.

Apple discontinued the 27" (high-end) iMacs when they switched from Intel to Apple Silicon. The 24" iMacs are basically the successors to the 21.5" ones.

If you need something higher-end, you could look at a M4 Pro Mac mini (available with up to 64 GB of RAM) or a M4 Max Mac Studio (available with up to 128 GB of RAM.)

baggafluff wrote: … Apple products have become toys for people with more money than sense and are no longer practical for people trying to survive in creative industries.

Man, I have to agree with you about not wanting (or needing) to buy a new computer every all the time!

I would say that, for me, Macs have great versatility, quality, and stability. And support. It is true that right now AI is getting lots of attention, and that seems to add a lot of flaky and silly distractions, but that always happens. We were playing pong-like games on Apple //s when VisiCalc came along and changed everything. We'll have to wait and see…