Q: How do I make Photos start over?
I when Photos came out I switched immediately and, unlike many people, I liked it. It does a better job of auto-enhancing than iPhoto, and the imported library was a close enough match to iPhoto that I could use it without any issues. However, after returning from a long trip overseas and importing 2500 pictures I found out that Photos did not allow for adding locations. This was very important. So, since the switch is one-way, the only way to get back into iPhoto and add the locations was to import all the photos again.
A few months later an update of Photos added the ability to set location data, so I thought I would switch back. When I opened Photos it said it was updating the library and I thought all would be fine. All it appears to have done was add an "iPhoto Events" folder. The new album I created for the trip is not there.
I have deleted all of the pictures from the first import, which are now duplicates (they are in the Photos trash still) and would like to make Photos start over from nothing; creating a fresh library which I hope will be as good a conversion as the first one. There are a few other pictures I imported into Photos only that I will have to get into iPhoto, but I need to get Photos into a usable state.
Also, I have read many times that iPhoto and Photos uses the same originals and it does not copy them when it updates to Photos, yet I have two "libraries"; one for iPhoto and one for Photos. The iPhoto one is 39GB and the other varies from 15GB to 27GB. Supposedly the Photos library is not really taking up that space, but shouldn't they be the same?
Mac mini (Mid 2010), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5), 8 GB RAM
Posted on Feb 26, 2016 11:59 AM