Help multiple photo libraries

Mac
#1

I need help I have 3 mac’s and I have discovered my photos are an absolute mess.

I am a avid photographer who used to separate my photos from my family. I used aperture and they used iPhoto… I have merged to Lightroom and they moved to Photos.

Unfortunately my libraries are a mess mainly because my children have decided to create multiple photo libraries and place them everywhere.

I have 8 on one mac. 4 on another. It is quite likely there are thousands of duplicates. How do I merge all the 12 photo and iPhoto libraries and then delete the duplicates. It also is likely that the merged library would be too large on the hard drive of 1 mac, so I assume I would move them all to an external hard drive. There is significant meta data in most of these libraries so I don’t want to loose these.

#2

There’s no good way to keep all your info within Photos or iPhotos, there are several different options for combining libraries, but they often come at a metadata cost. Since you do not want to lose that data, you might consider paying for iPhoto Library Manager which can do what you want. iPhoto Library Manager – Merge iPhoto libraries, find duplicate photos, and more

#3

Thanks for that. I will look into the tool and hopefully merge them all into 1 library

#4

Thanks for that, it was ideal for merging a number of iPhoto libraries

#5

Yeah, don’t do it manually and lose your wedding photos… Doesn’t go down well.

#6

Can confirm, lost photos from our honeymoon trip during a failed library consolidation back in the day.

#7

Yeah - very messy… was complicated further as I was copying to a WD MyCloud, that screwed up during transfer… though during my “spot check” everything appeared ok… :frowning: Whilst I DID attempt to keep a copy of the original files, some appear to have disappeared…

With multiple i-devices, and multiple computers, keeping photos all in 1 place has become a pain in the ass.

#8

Scary.

Trusting photos in Photos is a step of faith. It was a simpler time when iPhotos/ Aperture allowed remote file management - now everything is “managed” by the app.