The error “com.apple.ImageCaptureCore error -9934” during import (e.g. from an iPhone) can be caused by a lot of things, according to the Internet:
- Permission errors with the destination folder (e.g. not writable by the current user).
- Conversion failures if you have the iPhone set to export images in “compatible” formats rather than their originals1
- Unsupported image formats (e.g. HEIC) on very old versions of macOS (macOS 10.12 Sierra and earlier).
- The destination folder not existing.
- Etc.
Basically it seems like this “-9934” error is a catch-all for any kind of I/O error. Good job, Apple, in providing useful information to your users.
But add to the aforementioned list one other possibility, that I didn’t see mentioned anywhere: the destination volume is full.
I’ve been hitting this error message in Image Capture sporadically for months and been baffled by it – especially since it seemed to occur for seemingly random sets of images and videos, that were sometimes consistent between attempts and sometimes changed unpredictably. Which is of course the result of the destination volume being perpetually close to full but varying slightly over time as random bits & pieces are added or removed from it.
It’s especially tricky because the destination volume won’t typically show as actually full, in the Finder – it could have virtually any amount of space left, even hundreds of gigabytes, because the particular image or video that hits the limit could be huge, and Image Capture either tries to pre-allocate the entire file’s space up front (failing immediately if there’s insufficient space) or retroactively zeroes out the file if it encounters a write error. Either way, it leaves a bunch of zero-byte files (the failed transfers) behind, rather than incompletely-written ones, further hiding the fact that it ran out out of disk space.
- Please don’t ever do that. It means transcoding your original images from DNG or HEIC into JPEGs, increasing their file size and/or reducing their quality in the process. Don’t do it. DNG and HEIC are old formats that are widely supported – not just on Apple devices, but Windows as well (and probably most Linux distros). ↩︎
Hardly surprising. The software engineering at Apple keeps getting sloppier and less rigorous as they focus too much on a the whims of the design team to keep reskinning the UI rather than good internal design and fixing bugs. They have become beholden to the now annual hardware refresh cycles. Sadly, as a developer and business user, all this does is kill productivity of their users.