Photos library greyed out – can’t select

[quartermarsh]

Hi Nik,
I purchased and installed RAW Power 3.2.2 today from the app store. When I opend it and attempted to select my photos library, which is the system photos library (as it is my only library), I see that the library is greyed out in the file picker. In fact, all image files are greyed out. Trying with “New Photo Libray Window” opens a new window in RAW Power with no photos in it, just categories. I”m using Mojave on a 2012 MBP. I checked security and privacy settings and RAW Power has access to Photos. I even gave it Full Disk access to no avail. I’ve chaecked Litle Snitch and LuLu and both are allowing all connections. I set up another admin user account and got the same result. I downloaded the trial version and got the same result. I have iCloud photo library on with ‘download originals to this mac selected’. I suspect that either something else about my set up is causing this issue or something went haywire with the app store download. It did take repeated attempts to purchase and repeated attempts to download but that’s nothing new with the mac app store these days. My receipt from apple arrived in my inbox so that seems to have worked. I do have RAW Power on both my iPhone and Ipad with iCloud sync on (I tried turning sync off and that didn’t help either). Of course, I can’t rule out a stupid user error, sigh…
At this point, I’m stumped! Any help would be much appreciated.
Mark

[quartermarsh]

Hmmm, I just tried the RAW Power extension in the Photos app and it works. That’s interesting.

[quartermarsh]

Hmmm, I just tried the RAW Power extension in the Photos app and it works. That’s interesting.

[Nik Bhatt]

Hi,

Photo Library access is only supported with Catalina (macOS 10.15) or later. That’s because Catalina is the first OS that allows 3rd party apps to read/write the Photo library.

I’m puzzled that you got as far as you did with the Photo library. There should be blocks in the app for Photo Library on Mojave (I just checked my Mojave install and the New Photo Library window is disabled). So, there must be a bug in the app that is letting that through – so, sorry for that.

The Photo extension, however, works fine on Mojave because that was added in a much earlier release of MacOS (Sierra or maybe El Capitan – I don’t recall).

[quartermarsh]

Thanks Nik.
I was confused because the app store page indicated that RP worked on ‘this mac’. Somewhere along the line I missed the details about that. It’s great to have the extension but I was rather looking forward to the library management part of RP.
Meanwhile, I think I’ve found a another bug. In the file picker, the photo library will be greyed out and can’t be selected. If one right clicks or two finger taps it and selects ‘rename’ in the drop down it will select the library. Opening that will load the library into the browser window. What gets loaded is, as far as I can tell, the entire ‘resources’ folder within the Photo library—one of the folders you see when you ‘show package contents’ on the photos library. At least it’s any image files in that folder; so the subfolders ‘media’ and ‘proxies’. It’s kind of cool. You can edit images—if you can find what you want 😉 All the basic functions work. You can sort it, filter it etc. which is cool because you can filter it to only show you RAW images, which is really all you’d want on work on with RP anyhow. I’d be interest to know if you can reproduce this on your Mojave install. Anyhow, I though you’d want to know.
By the way, your apps are fabulous. Thanks so much for the care and attention you put into them.
Mark

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by quartermarsh.

[Nik Bhatt]

It’s definitely possible to access the images in the Photos library in that manner. For example it’s possible to open the photo library package in the Finder and drag the “originals” directory to RAW Power, which would just show you the originals instead of all the thumbnails and whatnot. However, that’s not the intent of the “Photo Library” feature. The Photo Library feature gives you access to synchronized ratings, non-destructive edits that sync over iCloud, integration with the RAW Power Photos extension, and the ability to manipulate the photos library as well.

I should be clear that working with the Photo library manner by accessing internal directories is an unsupported configuration, because Apple does not support people messing around inside the Photo library. You have to be extremely careful if you choose to use the app in this manner. Definitely do not delete any originals, for example (or use Move to Trash). I do not know what else might not work.

[quartermarsh]

Thanks for the warning Nik. I stick to working through the extension 🙂
Over the years I’ve learned to be careful about messing with the file system.

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