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Did Apple lose my photos/videos?

Hi all! I need help trying to playback (recover?) some old videos from my “Photos” library.

Every time I try to play’em back, this message pops up: “Unable to Load Video, An error occurred while loading a higher quality version of this video”

What the heck??? Why did they "disappeared" from my LOCAL library, anyway??? Do you guys have a fix for this?

My devices:

MacBookPro13,3 (358 GB free on system drive)

macOs 10.15.7


iPhone 11 Pro (225 GB free on storage)

iOs 14.0.1


Thanks in advance!

iPhone 11 Pro

Posted on Oct 17, 2020 7:52 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 18, 2020 6:46 AM

Hi Léonie!

PROBLEM SOLVED! When I checked the info, in macOS’s "Photos" App, I saw the "Edit With >" option. Then I’ve chosen to edit with QuickTime Player and... VOILÁ! It opened in a QuickTime player window and played back flawlessly!!! From there, I just exported the video and, end of the story!

Thank you for your responses. Thanks to you I’ve came around with the solution!

Similar questions

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 18, 2020 6:46 AM in response to léonie

Hi Léonie!

PROBLEM SOLVED! When I checked the info, in macOS’s "Photos" App, I saw the "Edit With >" option. Then I’ve chosen to edit with QuickTime Player and... VOILÁ! It opened in a QuickTime player window and played back flawlessly!!! From there, I just exported the video and, end of the story!

Thank you for your responses. Thanks to you I’ve came around with the solution!

Oct 17, 2020 8:23 AM in response to wr3yes

Are you using iCloud Photos? If yes, is "Optimise iPhone Storage" enabled?



What kind of videos are the videos, that cannot be played? Have the videos been taken with your iPhone? Have they been synced to iPhone from a computer?

There are three possible reasons for videos giving this error message:

  • Lack of storage: Photos may not be able to download a high resolution original from iCloud, if your device does no have enough free storage to save the downloaded video. How much free storage is on your device?
  • A problem with the network or the cloud servers: If Photos cannot access Apple's servers to download the video, you might be seeing this message. Is your device connected to Wi-Fi?
  • An incompatible format: The video may be using a codec, that is no longer supported by iOS 14. has the video been taken a long time ago, and is encoded in a format, that is neither HEVC nor H.264?


Oct 17, 2020 11:53 AM in response to léonie

First things first: Thank you léonie!

Well, I used iCloud Photos for a while, but then, I reverted it to “Off”. So I’m not using it right now, but I used to do it.

I’ve never used “optimize storage” though.

All of the “problematic” videos were recorded like eight years ago, with an iPhone 5S, and later synced to Photos on a MacBook Pro (locally).

Storage is not an issue today, nor was it in the past. I’m used to have way more storage capacity than I actually need, so... not any problem there.

Network? I’ve discarded that, because I’ve tried over (several) wifi networks and over my -decently fast- LTE mobile network, without success.

About the codecs/wrappers... It’d be really disrespectful from Apple, to just drop support for any given codec without heaving us, users a REMARKABLE heads up about our valuable content! I don’t really know what codecs are those videos, but I assume they are H.264 coded. Since I don’t have access to them anymore, I can’t even make sure about that.

what is really strange, is the fact that I CAN PLAY BACK certain videos from that same phone! In some cases, they’re even older than the ones I can’t reproduce now.


Anyway... I appreciate your kind response, Léonie!

Oct 17, 2020 12:37 PM in response to wr3yes

All of the “problematic” videos were recorded like eight years ago, with an iPhone 5S, and later synced to Photos on a MacBook Pro (locally).

Do you still have the synced versions of the problematic videos on the Mac Book Pro? Or any computer you are using now? In Photos for Mac you can check the codec of these videos in the Info.


Did Apple lose my photos/videos?

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