Merge Photo Libraries Mac Sierra

01.06.2020

Free Stock Photo Libraries
Merge Photo Libraries Mac Sierra Free

As an OS X user you likely have at least some of your photos stored in Apple’s provided Photos application, and by doing so, you can use them with iCloud services, and in applications that interface with OS X’s media sharing services. However, there might be times where you want to keep some photos separate from others, and manage them in more private ways than having them accessible by other applications and services.

Oct 25, 2019 How to use albums and libraries in Photos for Mac How do I use albums and libraries in Photos for Mac? If you are running macOS Sierra and older, you can actually hide or unhide the sidebar as you wish. Reference libraries won't play nicely with iCloud Photo Library users; you may run into problems when syncing, or not be able to sync. Mar 05, 2015 From that point on, I stopped using iPhoto on my mac. So I have an icloud library for the past few months and an old 'archive' iphoto library. My idea is to now merge the two. How can I do it without losing any photos? - If I enable iCloud photo in my old iphoto library, will Photos.app merge the icloud library with the local library? Dec 14, 2017 Does your Mac's Photos library need some organization? Here are David's favorite tricks to organize your pictures. A lot of people put.

If you want to keep the contents of your photo libraries separate, don’t turn on iCloud Photos for more than one library in Photos. Photos in your System Photo Library are available in apps like iMovie, Pages, and Keynote. Sync iphoto to pc. You can use iCloud Photos, Shared Albums, and My Photo Stream only with the System Photo Library. You can also sync them to iOS devices and view them on Apple TV. And if you want to use your own images as your desktop picture or screen saver, the images need to be in your System Photo Library before you can select them in System Preferences.If you have only one photo library, then it's the System Photo Library. If you choose a different library in Photos without designating it as the System Photo Library, the iCloud tab in Photos preferences is disabled:If you designate a new library as the System Photo Library and then turn on iCloud Photos, the photos and videos in the new library will merge with those already in your iCloud Photos.

Apr 08, 2015 One of the great features in Aperture (but not iPhoto) was the ability to merge libraries. There isn't a merge feature in Photos, but there is a workaround. This will be critical to know if you want to play with Photos today, then later combine this with your existing Aperture or iPhoto libraries. Oct 25, 2019 How to use albums and libraries in Photos for Mac How do I use albums and libraries in Photos for Mac? If you are running macOS Sierra and older, you can actually hide or unhide the sidebar as you wish. Reference libraries won't play nicely with iCloud Photo Library users; you may run into problems when syncing, or not be able to sync.

Creating a new library

Free Stock Photo Libraries

Creating a new library for your various projects is relatively simple. First quit Photos, then launch it while holding the Option key, and you should see the library manager window appear. In here, you should see your current library listed, but also have the option to create a new library. Once created, you can then drag and drop or otherwise import the photos you want, and this new library will be the default one used when Photos launches.

By creating multiple libraries in this manner, you can keep projects separate and also spread out where you have your photos stored your library’s location, including storing it on a secondary partition, an external drive, or on a network attached storage (NAS) device.

Switching libraries

With multiple libraries on your Mac, you can switch between them very easily using two methods. The first is using the same library manager, so simply quit and relaunch Photos with the Option key held, and you can then select your library. However, an even easier approach is to simply open any of your photo libraries directly in the Finder, and it will open in Photos and become the default library used. With this approach, simply place the libraries or aliases to them in a convenient location, and then open them directly, instead of opening the Photos application itself.

The library chooser gives you a list of libraries that are in default locations on your Mac. You can use this panel to create new libraries, or choose those in non-standard locations like network storage drives.

The real issue with multiple libraries is not which library is the default opened with Photos, but which is used as your System Library, that is, the one that third-party services like iCloud and other applications will reference when they are instructed to access your photo library. To change this, you need to go to the Photos preferences and click the button to use the current library as the System Library.

The caveat here is that in order to use a library with iCloud and other services, it must be stored on a volume that is formatted to Apple’s native HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) format. You can check this on any locally-attached drive by selecting it in the Finder and pressing Command-i to reveal the information window. Then expand the General section, where you should see its format listed.

Merging Photos libraries

Update (11/3/2015): PowerPhotos 1.1 now supports library merging!

Unlike iPhoto Library Manager, PowerPhotos does not yet have the capability to merge libraries together. This is something I’d like to add to PowerPhotos, though I can’t make any concrete promises, since doing so partially depends on whether Photos itself adds a few necessary enhancements. In the meantime, since I get asked about this a lot, I thought I’d put up a quick summary of the existing methods to get your content all together into a single Photos library.

Merge your iPhoto libraries beforehand

At this point, most people looking to merge libraries together have existing iPhoto or Aperture libraries that they’re either planning to migrate to Photos, or have already done so. Since merging options with Photos itself are very limited, if you do want to merge your libraries, it will be much easier to first merge everything together as iPhoto libraries, then take the resulting merged iPhoto library and migrate *that* to Photos afterward.

If you haven’t migrated any of your existing libraries yet, then simply use iPhoto Library Manager to merge the libraries together first, then open the merged library in Photos to let it perform the migration (Aperture can also be used to merge iPhoto libraries, though it doesn’t perform duplicate detection like iPLM does). If you have already migrated some/all of your iPhoto libraries though, you may still be able to follow this route. Photos leaves the original iPhoto library intact after performing the migration, so as long as you haven’t deleted the iPhoto library yourself, you should be able to go back and perform the merge, then migrate the merged library to Photos.

To migrate an iPhoto library a second time, the easiest way is to use the File > Migrate iPhoto Libraries command in PowerPhotos. Just check the box next to the iPhoto library and click Migrate, and PowerPhotos will take care of the details. To do it without PowerPhotos, you’ll need to open the library in iPhoto first, and it should give you a brief messing saying that the library has been migrated to Photos already. Click the “Open in iPhoto” button, then close the library back up. Then, take the iPhoto library and drop it on the Photos icon in the dock, and it will perform the migration a second time.

If you have imported any newer photos into Photos since you performed your first migration, those photos will not have been imported into iPhoto, and thus will be missing from the merged library. If this is the case, you’ll just need to either export those photos from the first Photos library that you migrated, then import them into the second library, or just reimport/redownload them from your iPhone or wherever they may have come from.

Use iCloud to merge your content

The other technique that can be used here is to merge everything together by uploading it into your iCloud Photo Library. This will work with any Photos library, whether it was migrated from iPhoto originally or not, and can be used to merge libraries on different Macs (though they must be using the same iCloud account). The basic workflow for this is:

First, you’ll want to choose which one of your libraries you want to ultimately be the merged library, that will ultimately hold all the content.
Open that library in Photos, open the preferences window, and click the “Use as System Photo Library” button. Then, in the iCloud section of the preferences, enable iCloud Photo Library. Make sure that the “Download Original to this Mac” option is enabled.
Photos will start syncing your library with iCloud, uploading all of the full size photos from your Photos library.
If you already have other devices with iCloud Photo Library enabled (e.g. your iPhone or iPad), in addition to uploading all the photos in your Photos library, it will also download any photos that have already been synced with those devices.
Once that library has been fully synced (this may take quite some time if the library is large, even multiple days), open a different library in Photos, and repeat the same steps. The content from the second library will be added to what’s already in iCloud Photo Library.
By default, syncing the second library with iCloud will also download all the content from the first library into the second library onto your Mac. However, if you enable the “Optimize Mac Storage” option in the iCloud preferences in Photos, that will only initially download smaller thumbnail versions of each photo, which can speed up this part of the process and use less disk space and bandwidth.
If you have more than two libraries, repeat the same steps for each library you want to merge.
Once you’ve processed the rest of the libraries, open the first one up again, enable iCloud Photo Library on it, and let it redownload all the full sized photos that were uploaded from the other libraries.

While this is an effective way to get your libraries merged together, there are a few significant downsides:

If you have a significant amount of photos that you need to merge together, it’s going to take a lot of time, bandwidth, and disk space to perform all of this uploading and downloading from iCloud. For really large collections, you may be looking at a project spanning multiple days or even weeks.
iCloud only provides 5 GB of storage for free, so if your collection exceeds that (which is not difficult), you’ll need to purchase one of Apple’s larger storage plans, at least while you’re doing all the syncing. If you’re not interested in using iCloud Photo Library in the long run, it is possible to bump up your storage for a short time, remove the photos from iCloud once you’ve gotten everything downloaded back to your Mac, then move your account back down to the basic storage plan.
If you have an iOS device also synced with iCloud, it will start to download all the content that you’re uploading, which can sometimes eat up bandwidth and battery life. You may want to enable the “optimize storage” option in the Photos section of the Settings app on your iOS device before starting, or just turn off iCloud Photo Library altogether if you want to prevent that.
There are a few limitations to what will sync through iCloud, which you can read about here