texasstar7

Q: iPhoto Photos iCloud and an external hard drive

I'm so confused right now. I would appreciate some clarification.


Can you import your iPhoto Library from an external HDD into the Photos app, and have all those photos sync up to iCloud Photo Library and have optimize storage turned on such that if you unplug the HDD, you still have access to all the photos uploaded to iCloud Photo Library on your Mac?


Complicating factors:

- I already have a Photos library, but I located an old (potentially lost) file of photos on an old HDD. When I tried to open it, it said I did not have enough disk space.


Please help!

MacBook Air, iOS 9.1

Posted on Nov 5, 2015 11:03 AM

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Q: iPhoto Photos iCloud and an external hard drive

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  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Nov 5, 2015 11:36 AM in response to texasstar7
    Level 10 (106,883 points)
    iLife
    Nov 5, 2015 11:36 AM in response to texasstar7
    but I located an old (potentially lost) file of photos on an old HDD. When I tried to open it, it said I did not have enough disk space.

    What is the file system of the drive with your old iPhoto Library?

    You can open an iPhoto Library on an external drive in Photos, but the file system of the drive should be MAcOS Extended (Journaled).  If the file system is different,the Photos.app will create the migrated library on your system drive, and that may be the reason for the warning about not enough storage.

    Move the library you want to open in Photos to a correctly formatted drive, then try again.

     

    Photos does not yet support to merge two libraries, but you can open each library in turn.  Only one library can be your system photos library and sync with iCloud, see:  https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/?lang=en#/pht6d60b524

  • by texasstar7,

    texasstar7 texasstar7 Nov 6, 2015 6:04 AM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Nov 6, 2015 6:04 AM in response to léonie

    Okay, so although we've always had Macs and not PCs, for some reason this hard drive was formatted as MS-DOS (FAT32). So, it looks like that is the reason. So, you're saying to drag the "iPhoto Library) file to another, correctly formatted hard drive? I will try that today.  I'm so nervous about all this, because we lost our original iPhotos library (7 years of family photos, kids' births etc..) in a mistake (drive reformat). So, I'm trying to reconstruct from a bunch of very old backups. I'd hate to make another mistake.

     

    Thank you for your help. I am planning on eventually purchasing a software to help me merge the two libraries, but in the meantime I just want to see what is there.

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Nov 6, 2015 6:38 AM in response to texasstar7
    Level 10 (106,883 points)
    iLife
    Nov 6, 2015 6:38 AM in response to texasstar7

    Okay, so although we've always had Macs and not PCs, for some reason this hard drive was formatted as MS-DOS (FAT32).

    That is problematic for all photo libraries - iPhoto, Aperture, Photos, see this link:  iPhoto: Issues with FAT32-formatted drives

    Filenames and pathnames on a FAT formatted drive may become ambiguous, Photos cannot create the hard links it needs on such a volume.

     

    Reformatting a drive will erase the drive. If you need to reformat a drive,  copy all data you want to keep to a different drive.  This explains how to format the drive:   https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201909

  • by texasstar7,

    texasstar7 texasstar7 Nov 6, 2015 11:24 AM in response to léonie
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Nov 6, 2015 11:24 AM in response to léonie

    Yes, the reformat was an accident from moving a previous library to a new drive, thinking it was moved correctly and then reformatting the old drive to use elsewhere. Unfortunately, it was not moved correctly, so it was an inaccessible file. We are now having to rebuilt that lost library with other old backups.

     

    Anyway, I will reformat a drive with Mac Journaled system format and move everything there. Thank you!