How To Migrate From Iphoto To Photos For Mac
A few months ago when was first shown to the public, Apple demonstrated its new Photos app. This app is meant to simplify photo management for all Mac users by emulating the looks and functions provided by the. This simplification comes at a cost though: when it finally releases its Photos app, it will replace iPhoto, its legendary photo management app that has been on every Mac by default for years. This move will definitely be hard on a lot of users, especially those who, like me, got used to working with iPhoto for so many years. Even worse: for most of us, our photo albums hold a huge number of dear memories, and as with every update, there is always the possibility of something going wrong when the time comes to migrate to the new Photos app.
With that considered, here are a couple of short guides on how to back up your both the simple way and the not-so-simple way. Back Up Your iPhoto Library: The Easy Way First, the good news (or bad depending on how you see it). In a very Apple way, in order to keep things simple and integrated on OS X, Apple consolidates your photos into a single, giant file that represents your photo library. But this file is not composed of just your photos, it also holds very important meta-data, like your events, photo stream shots and such. To find your iPhoto library, open any Finder window and click on the Pictures folder.
There you should find it. To back it up manually and without complications, all you have to do is copy the entire file to any destination you want. It can be a USB flash drive or a portable backup disk if you want and that’s it. Cool Tip: If you want to transfer your iPhoto Library to another Mac just plug your drive to it and copy your iPhoto library backup to the target Mac’s Pictures folder. Be warned though, this will replace your existing iPhoto library. So this tip is mostly. Back Up Your iPhoto Library: The Less-Easy Way If you want more control over what to back up from your library, there’s a way to do it that requires some digging around but that is perfect for that purpose.
For this, you have to head to the same iPhoto Library file within your Pictures folder, except this time instead of copying it, right-click on it and then select the Show Package Contents option. Then, head to the Masters folders. There you will see several folders categorizing the different years your photos belong to. When you open each of them, you will find folders for the different events, albums and dates that contain the photos as you organized them in iPhoto. There you will be able to select exactly what you want to back up and the way that you want to back it up.
And there you have it. Now you will always be in control of your photo library and most importantly, you will have peace of mind in case things don’t go that well with the new Photos app. Last updated on 8 Feb, 2018.
I have an iPhoto library that contains about 65,000 images. I rely heavily on iPhoto's proprietary features, and have been since I started using the first version of iPhoto when Apple released it well over a decade ago.
Apple's concept of a well-designed 'digital shoebox' has proven itself invaluable, time and time again. My family has an interesting arrangement. I have iPhoto 9.6.1 installed on my iMac.
My other family members use iPhoto 9.6.1 on a MacBook Pro. I upgraded both machines to MacOS 10.12 Sierra recently. Both machines use the same iPhoto library (library stored on an external portable hard drive), plugged into either computer (one at a time) via USB cable. Now on Sierra, and so far, iPhoto is still working. I am aware that iPhoto is EOL'd, meaning Apple no longer supports it. This is tremendously disappointing, as Apple's new official Photos app seems to be more like iPhoto Lite, or iPhoto 2004. I have a lot of time and effort invested in organizing Events with titles that I wrote like highly abbreviated summaries.
How To Export Photos From Iphoto To Mac
I also have alot of newspaper-style prose captions stored as metadata in the Comments pane for quite a few photos. I store this information, and more, for family members, volunteering for local civic organizations, events planning, and work projects. I am deeply concerned that migrating from iPhoto to Photos will ruin all that metadata and organization permanently.
I have roughly 65,000 images in my iPhoto library, dating back to before the beginning of the first version of iPhoto. (I bought my first digital camera in November 2001.) Will I be forced to migrate to Photos? If so, will all that valuable metadata (possibly thousands of photos) be lost? Is there any way to avoid this?
If Photos is not the answer, what consumer-based digital photography solution is available for Mac, Android-based smartphone (running Android 6), and iPad Mini (running iOS 11) can be used to reliably organize and manage a library of this size? I have a library that is over 100,000 pics and 1.1 Tb. I currently use photos and am having no problems. I probably upgraded too soon (back in the day) and lost some of my face data that I had to reconstruct, but those wer faces I had manually added or I think already had some problems. I can't tell you how many faces it was, but photos does such a better job of identifying faces, most of them were back in no time. As for the rest of it, keywords etc seemed to migrate over no problem. It is much faster than iphoto and since launch has brought become comparable to iphoto in terms of features and with 3rd party integrations actually surpassed it.
I sync all photos in icloud and on my phone and my ipad and multiple AppleTV's and have no problems. My phone and iPad are iOS11 and I have had no problems there either (even though I have not upgraded my photos library to the High Sierra version yet.) I keep all of my photos on an external 2Tb SSD over usb3 for speed (too big for my macbook pro 1Tb internal SSD. Initially upgrading the library took a LOOONG time and syncing all those photos to iCloud when I changed the external to be my system library took days, but I have had no problems since. What I will say is, I wouldn't upgrade to High Serra right now. It is new and I hear there are lots of migration bugs so I am holding off. Since you are on Sierra still I think you will be fine, I suggest you back up the photos library over time machine. I would also manually copy the library to a second external drive just for safe keeping.
1Tb drive are so cheap now, better safe than sorry to have an extra backup just in case. Then, if you upgrade and have problems, you can just copy the old iphoto database right back to your computer. The one complication you have is using the same library on two machines. I will post more on that shortly. I have a library that is over 100,000 pics and 1.1 Tb.
I currently use photos and am having no problems. I probably upgraded too soon (back in the day) and lost some of my face data that I had to reconstruct, but those wer faces I had manually added or I think already had some problems. I can't tell you how many faces it was, but photos does such a better job of identifying faces, most of them were back in no time. As for the rest of it, keywords etc seemed to migrate over no problem. It is much faster than iphoto and since launch has brought become comparable to iphoto in terms of features and with 3rd party integrations actually surpassed it. I sync all photos in icloud and on my phone and my ipad and multiple AppleTV's and have no problems.
My phone and iPad are iOS11 and I have had no problems there either (even though I have not upgraded my photos library to the High Sierra version yet.) I keep all of my photos on an external 2Tb SSD over usb3 for speed (too big for my macbook pro 1Tb internal SSD. Initially upgrading the library took a LOOONG time and syncing all those photos to iCloud when I changed the external to be my system library took days, but I have had no problems since. What I will say is, I wouldn't upgrade to High Serra right now. It is new and I hear there are lots of migration bugs so I am holding off. Since you are on Sierra still I think you will be fine, I suggest you back up the photos library over time machine. I would also manually copy the library to a second external drive just for safe keeping.
1Tb drive are so cheap now, better safe than sorry to have an extra backup just in case. Then, if you upgrade and have problems, you can just copy the old iphoto database right back to your computer. The one complication you have is using the same library on two machines.
I will post more on that shortly. Click to expand.Ok, so adding to this, you can use an external drive photo library as a 'System' library but it would have to be dedicated to one of the two machines you were previously swapping between.
Good news is, you can use iCloud to sync those libraries across computers and changes to photos made on one will show up on the other (and all your iOS devices) with no need to move a drive back and forth. The only caveat is that database info like people/faces is not migrated across devices in Sierra. Apple has said that will work across devices in High Sierra but I have not tested that myself since I have not upgraded. I actually keep a mac mini that is a second photo library synced across iCloud for myself as well.
I have an iPhoto library that contains about 65,000 images. I rely heavily on iPhoto's proprietary features, and have been since I started using the first version of iPhoto when Apple released it well over a decade ago. Apple's concept of a well-designed 'digital shoebox' has proven itself invaluable, time and time again. My family has an interesting arrangement.
I have iPhoto 9.6.1 installed on my iMac. My other family members use iPhoto 9.6.1 on a MacBook Pro. I upgraded both machines to MacOS 10.12 Sierra recently.
Both machines use the same iPhoto library (library stored on an external portable hard drive), plugged into either computer (one at a time) via USB cable. Now on Sierra, and so far, iPhoto is still working. I am aware that iPhoto is EOL'd, meaning Apple no longer supports it. This is tremendously disappointing, as Apple's new official Photos app seems to be more like iPhoto Lite, or iPhoto 2004. I have a lot of time and effort invested in organizing Events with titles that I wrote like highly abbreviated summaries. I also have alot of newspaper-style prose captions stored as metadata in the Comments pane for quite a few photos. I store this information, and more, for family members, volunteering for local civic organizations, events planning, and work projects.
I am deeply concerned that migrating from iPhoto to Photos will ruin all that metadata and organization permanently. I have roughly 65,000 images in my iPhoto library, dating back to before the beginning of the first version of iPhoto.
(I bought my first digital camera in November 2001.) Will I be forced to migrate to Photos? If so, will all that valuable metadata (possibly thousands of photos) be lost? Is there any way to avoid this? If Photos is not the answer, what consumer-based digital photography solution is available for Mac, Android-based smartphone (running Android 6), and iPad Mini (running iOS 11) can be used to reliably organize and manage a library of this size? Photos should handle the metadata you put into iPhotos' images, but there are some differences in organization.
I dunno the current state of how it handles titles, which I seem to recall altered file names in iPhoto. And events are dealt with a bit differently. I think they still get dealt with by being converted to albums, which is really what they are anyway. I'd suggest you get a copy of iPhoto Library Manager, and create a test iPhoto library you can convert to Photos and see how it goes. Sharing with Photos is a bit different if you're gonna use iCloud Photo Library (and probably that many images will require spending some if you wanna use it). Frankly, with that many I'd move 'em all to Lightroom. Consider that it has a tool to import an iPhoto library, but it doesn't have a tool to import a Photos library.
There are also some issues with Photos and backing up via TM in High Sierra, so be aware of that (if you store it externally), And Elements? I basically upgraded to LightRoom when Apple decided to abandon iPhoto and offer Photos (for kids) Lightroom seemed the obvious choice as 1. I had been Adobe Photoshop user since 1.0, and 2.
MOST if not ALL Professional Photographers were using LR, so I was excited to transition to LR and just did it. Basic conclusion after years of LR is that Adobe sucks.
Great Genius Level 'Ideas' for their programs, but incredibly frustrating lame UI and under logic interactions that will never be fixed, like needing to manually deselect an image, when you click on another, otherwise all of the effects like rotating, keywords etc will be applied to all, instead of the just clicked on single photo. (But then again Apple SUCKS hard in the need to have the iOS Keyboard 'Up' to underline, or make a character bold, and the incredible difficulty inserting the curser, and a beyond horrible keyboard, spell checker, and other issues like Stalling everyones older devices when a new one comes out like right now. but I digress.) In LightRoom there is the very serious annoying issue of having to extract my photos from my iPhones, then deleting them, using 'Image Capture' into a folder on my desktop, then import into LR, as LR crashes on Importing Photos, due to a probably purpose-able Flaw not fixed by Apple.
IPhoto was WAY more intuitive in how it organizes film rolls, and key words, and re-naminig titling images. LR is a major huge hassle that makes your life miserable as you have to proverbally fight a bear instead of enjoying the walk thru the forest. Keyword lists are massive and you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to rename photos.
(Why isn't the title clickable on or over the image?) Also the import from iPhoto to LR was buggy and I'm still not sure I got everything. LAME But if you learn their cryptic assbackwards logic of how to do everything, Light Room is probably superior. I mostly use Photoshop to work on choosen Photos, but if your using Photos or Lightroom to edit the photos I would probably give LR and huge edge here, as the editing capabilities of Photos is probably pretty limited consumer level at best, while LR and or PS is at very high professional level. If I had to do it again, I probably would still choose Lightroom, but I do wish it was a better program.
Don't forget that The $600 a year for LR/CS subscription is obnoxious. But I also use InDesign and Illustrator. You could get just the LR/PS bundle for a lot less. Click to expand.Question PPopMatt: how have you managed to make LR workable? I've got 100,000 photos in Aperture - been putting off moving. I thought I'd try LR so I did a test import of 5000 photos from two iPhones, and found LR to be a freaking nightmare. Imports looked finished but never actually completed by themselves.
Videos all played upside down. Even browsing photos was slow and clunky on a medium spec 2017 iMac 27' with Fusion drive. Haven't even got to editing yet. No joy on any forums or with Adobe support in getting basic functionality working.
Wasted days on reinstalls, different versions, workarounds, re-imports, deleting preferences. The list goes on. I really can't see why LR is the go-to software for enthusiasts. It's a piece of crap. Am I missing something? Question PPopMatt: how have you managed to make LR workable?
I've got 100,000 photos in Aperture - been putting off moving. I thought I'd try LR so I did a test import of 5000 photos from two iPhones, and found LR to be a freaking nightmare. Imports looked finished but never actually completed by themselves. Videos all played upside down. Even browsing photos was slow and clunky on a medium spec 2017 iMac 27' with Fusion drive. Haven't even got to editing yet. No joy on any forums or with Adobe support in getting basic functionality working.
Wasted days on reinstalls, different versions, workarounds, re-imports, deleting preferences. The list goes on. I really can't see why LR is the go-to software for enthusiasts.
It's a piece of crap. Am I missing something? Click to expand.Lightroom is. It does the 'job' but it is annoying, clunky, doesn't import from the iPhone correctly and crashes, Displays videos Upside Down. UNINTUITIVE, and yes is a slow annoying (did I already say annoying) program. But it does its job.
I wouldn't use another program, but I Wish it was better!! You don't have to eff with the settings, or reinstall it. It is what it is. It's only 80% finished probably on purpose (what else do their engineers do?), but it sells and is professional, and it is used worldwide. If you use it as it is, it will do its job, but again it is annoying. I had to use Google to look up how to just apply a keyword to only one photo that you select on the photo itself, like in the apple finder, but lo and behold, you have to 'click on the area outside the photo in the box, to just select the one, otherwise it will apply the action to all photos previously selected.