macos – “Photographs can’t load changes for this picture” error since upgrading to Catalina

Steps to breed:

• Migrate massive pictures library from a MacBook 2016 working Photographs Mojave to a MacBook 2020 working Photographs Catalina (in my case 120,000+ pictures)

• A subset of pictures (in my case 10,000+ pictures from 2016/2017) can’t be edited: while you click on on the edit button you get “Can’t begin modifying: Photographs can’t load changes for this picture”

• Speculation: it’s doubtless that the affected pictures the place beforehand edited with Aperture and/or earlier variations of iPhoto.

• I’ve already tried all the following: restore library, boot in secure mode. Nothing helped.

Associated dialogue discussion board threads (all of those threads had been closed as a consequence of lack of exercise, can’t be re-opened, and provide no resolution)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250932769

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250852440

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250870058

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250771558

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251094038

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251245094

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251602029

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251036700

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251382514

Possibly it’s associated to this: “In June 2014, Apple introduced that improvement of Aperture has been discontinued. Since then, Apple has launched six main macOS upgrades. For technical causes, macOS Mojave is the final model of macOS to run Aperture. Beginning with macOS Catalina, Aperture is now not suitable with macOS.”

https://help.apple.com/en-us/HT209594

I think (however am not 100% positive) that the affected pictures in migrated picture library had been sooner or later edited by Aperture.

Simply to be clear: I’m not attempting to edit any pictures utilizing Aperture on Catalina. I had already migrated all my pictures from Aperture to Photographs again on Mojave (or earlier) earlier than I migrated from Photographs on Mojave to Photographs on Catalina.

Replace 1: Apple tech help has escalated this challenge to Apple engineering on 13-Aug-2020

Replace 2: I used to be in a position to decide a distinction within the plist for a “unhealthy” picture (= affected by the difficulty) and a “good” picture (= not affected by the difficulty):

Good picture:

adjustmentEditorBundleID = com.apple.Photographs (higher case P)
adjustmentFormatVersion = 1.5

Unhealthy picture:

adjustmentEditorBundleID = com.apple.pictures (decrease case p)
adjustmentFormatVersion = 1.4

Speculation: the pictures that had been edited in Aperture and migrated to Photographs (years earlier than the migration from Mojave to Catelina) have adjustmentFormatVersion 1.4 and I think that Catalina Photographs can’t parse adjustmentFormatVersion 1.4 since help for Apterture was eliminated.

Or possibly, Photographs is confused by the uppercase P versus lowecase p (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7688379/is-bundle-id-case-sensitive)

Replace 3:

Whereas debugging the difficulty, I found one other and sure extra essential distinction between “good” and “unhealthy” post-migration pictures on the brand new MacBook 2020 working Catalina:

Additionally, I discovered some attention-grabbing variations within the pre-migration pictures on the previous MacBook 2016 working Mojave:

• “good” pictures have:

  • path = empty
  • ismissing = True

• “unhealthy” pictures have:

  • path = a totally certified path pointing someplace into the Masters/<yr>/<month>/<day>/<timestamp>/... listing within the pictures library
  • ismissing = False