How to make the “Pictures” folder a folder again

Question

Question:

Is it possible to change a package directory into an ordinary directory, and how?

Context:

I was copying an old iPhoto library to my "~/Pictures" folder from an external drive, but I somehow made a mistake as only the subdirectories of the iPhoto library were copied over.

I tried making a new ".photolibrary" directory and moving the subdirectories into that, but the system still thinks that my Pictures folder is a ".photolibrary" directory. It comes up as a "package" rather than as a folder now, meaning I can only access it throught the command line or by choosing "show package contents" in Finder.

Also, when I tried renaming the new photolibrary to be the same as the old one, I get an error message saying that there already exists a directory with that name, even though there doesn't. I'm guessing the Pictures folder/package somehow comes up as having the name of my old photolibrary after I copied it over.

Edit:

I am using OSX version 10.9, so I don't think SIP applies.

ls -dle@ ~/Pictures 
drwxrwxrwx@ 131 User  staff  4454 19 Jun 01:37 /Users/User/Pictures
com.apple.FinderInfo      32
com.apple.quarantine      21
0: group:everyone deny delete

This is what comes up when I do "get info" on my Pictures folder:

Answer 1

Using answer space to provide pictures...

Get Info on both your Pictures & Photos Library directories, make sure they are named as below, Pictures & Photos Library.photoslibrary
Also check whether the extension is hidden for only the Library & whether something managed to rename it with a double extension .photoslibrary.photoslibrary - which has been known to happen.

The Pictures directory ought to be protected by SIP & not allow you to change it. Post a comment below if the Pictures naming is wrong & you need to change it.
Photos Library can be renamed at will [though Photos.app may lose it until you tell it where to look]

To look inside the package, you can just right click it & Show Package Contents, however, the .photoslibrary structure can be toggled between a regular folder & package by adding/removing the .photoslibrary extension then rebooting.

Post a comment if I missed anything & I'll tweak my answer.

Answer 2

Here's an apple discussions page where another user has the same problem: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2586142?tstart=0

This problem is due to the fact that OS X has what's called a "bundle bit" that determines whether a folder is a bundle or not.

Answer 3

The ~/Pictures folder is showing two extended attributes it shouldn't have, com.apple.FinderInfo which is probably holding the bundle bit and com.apple.quarantine. In a Terminal use the following commands to remove both extended attributes that shouldn't be there.

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo ~/Pictures
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ~/Pictures

No need to deal with Developer Tools at this point as removing the extended attributes with xattr, which is already a part of OS X, will do the job.

Note that the reason I said "which is probably holding the bundle bit" because without seeing the output of xattr -l ~/Pictures to compare, then under the circumstances I'm logically assuming that's the info being held.

In any case the ~/Pictures folder should not have any extended attributes set and, aside from the normally expected output, only the ACL of 0: group:everyone deny delete is appropriate output of ls -dle@ ~/Pictures I asked for.