Exporting photos error message

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Level 1

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Exporting photos error message

I've been offloading photos from my Macbook to a flash-drive to clear up memory space, and transferred over 22,000 photos last night. I'd left my laptop alone and checked back hours later when it was done, and saw an export error message on the screen. In the end, 2 photos were not transferred due to some error. When I clicked 'Show in Finder,' which I thought would take me to those 2 photos, instead the computer opened the photo album I'd been copying over and closed the window before I had time to note down what those 2 photos were. Is there some way to look up activities history or figure out which 2 photos were not moved to the flash-drive? Would starting the transfer process of 22,000 photos to the flash-drive again just duplicate all my photos or would I have the option to skip duplicates? Would that take too long? Is there any solution?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 15.7

Posted on Oct 6, 2025 10:42 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

200,501 points

Oct 7, 2025 1:16 AM in response to cocorena

When you export again to the same folder, you will duplicates, but the filenames will have an appended number 1, like this:

I wuold try agin to export, but to a different folder. And take a screenshot of the error message, before you try to find the photos that could not be exported.

Txpical reasons for export errors are:

network problems, when the originals are needing downloading from iCloud
Track of memory, if you are exporting two many photos at once
duplicate filenames in the same export
damaged, missing, or unreadable image files.

To identify the culprits, it will be easier to export in smaller batches, perhaps no more than 1000 items at once. Then most exports should succeed, and you will have only a small group of photos, if you are getting again an error message when exporting a small group.

To create smaller subsets of photos systematically and be sure to export all photos without missing some, it will help to create a smart album with the rule "Date is in the range ...".

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