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I'm giving up. For over a year Photos on macOS says "Preparing to import from ..." in an infinite loop.

None of the try-everything suggestions actually works. At most, putting the phone in Airplane mode succeeds one time in 3-4, and even then it works very briefly. Syncing with Image Capture rather than Photos works, but then Photos takes over and restarts the loop. I upgraded iOS and macOS to no avail.

I'd now like to use another mechanism. Manually using AirDrop for a few dozen photos/videos at a time is too tedious. It's also error-prone. I found (the hard way, of course) that dragging the photos from the Downloads folder to Photos adds the photos but the files must remain in Downloads. When you add a photo to Photos, Photos clearly does a hard link and not a soft link (as in ln -s).

I know that Photos is built into macOS, at least the recent releases, and that it's not possible to remove it. I'm not even sure where the Photos.app folder is. It's not under /Applications.

Is there an option to not use Photos on macOS to maintain/sync iOS photos? In other words, when I connect an iPhone to macOS using Thuderbolt, I'd like the Photos app to not launch. (Finding an app that syncs will be step #2; for now I'm asking about this step #1).

In case it's relevant, I've been upgrading macOS in-place since Tiger. That by itself is likely a bad idea, but given how opaque iTunes, iPhotos (previously), and now Photos are in maintaining their databases, it's not too clear how I can copy music + photos/videos following a clean install.

Calaf
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  • don't really have an answer here, but regarding your last thing, iTunes and Photos store their databases as folders on your computer that you can see in ~/Music and ~/Pictures - if you want to copy them just copy those folders to an external disk or from one partition to the new one. – Ezekiel May 27 '22 at 02:01
  • @Ezekiel Have you successfully moved ~/Music and ~/Pictures to an alternative location, upgraded macOS, then moved them back, and found your music and your photos intact? – Calaf May 27 '22 at 02:54
  • This seems to ask several things at once, making it hard to answer. How the auto-launch of Photos can be prevented is described in the answers to the question on top. Can you maybe post new, specific questions for the issues? – nohillside May 27 '22 at 05:15
  • @Calaf Yes I have – Ezekiel May 27 '22 at 22:22

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