A numeric error code is always frustrating to see; The “4302” error when opening Photos for macOS is just as opaque as most of the others. Some readers have seen this code when copying Photos to their Mac says it cannot open the Photos library. Others, when they have slowdowns with Photos or see blurry previews.
In most cases, the answer seems to be that macOS 11 Big Sur does not support, or at least does not fully support, a photo library located on an external drive formatted for Windows compatibility using Windows. ‘ExFAT. You can check if this is the case by selecting the drive in Finder and choosing File> Get Info. In the Format field, it will read ExFAT.
Fortunately, the solution seems simple, even though it requires sufficient disk capacity to reformat the ExFAT drive:
- Copy everything from the ExFAT drive to another drive and make sure you have everything.
- Start Disk Utility (found in Applications> Utilities) and select the drive from the sidebar. (If you don’t see the drive, select View> Show all devices.)
- Warning: This step is destructive and irreversible. Click on To erase.
- In the dialog box that appears, enter a drive name, select APFS of Format menu, and GUID Partition Map from Scheme menu.
- Click on To erase. Disk Utility will reformat and partition the disk and mount it.
- Copy the old content from the player to the new player.
- Hold down the Option key and launch Photos.
- From Choose library menu, click Other library and access your photo library on the newly reformatted drive. Select this library and click Choose library.
You should be back to normal.
If that fails, exit Photos and hold down the Command-Option key while launching Photos. Click on repair when prompted. It can take a long time.
If this also fails, you may have an irreparably damaged photo library, but you can still recover your unmodified source media. This 2017 Mac 911 column remains accurate for the method of recovering these files.
This Mac 911 article is in response to a question posed by Macworld reader Miguel.
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