I recently downgraded my Intel iMac (2019) from Sonoma back to Ventura. It’s much more stable and doesn’t require me to zap the P-RAM every other day. Unfortunately, Photos doesn’t work. I still have the raw files, but I’ve lost 20 years of albums. Any suggestions how to restore them without rebuilding them from scratch?
iMac 27″, macOS 13.7
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.
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.
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.
Sadly, they’re not backed up to iCloud. I have almost 200GB of photos.
Yes, I do have a Time Machine back-up on an external drive. Good shout. Thanks!
How to restore photos after downgrading from Sonoma to Ventura?
