AlessandroMendozza

Q: How can i merge photo library maintaining albums and metadata from both libraries

Hello,

my question is about: how can I merge two photos libraries (.photo-library) maintaining all the albums and metadata from both library?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014)

Posted on May 18, 2016 12:18 PM

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Q: How can i merge photo library maintaining albums and metadata from both libraries

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  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie May 18, 2016 12:56 PM in response to AlessandroMendozza
    Level 10 (106,848 points)
    iLife
    May 18, 2016 12:56 PM in response to AlessandroMendozza

    Photos has no direct way to merge libraries, preserving albums and metadata. iCloud Photo Library would be the best option. Merging with PowerPhotos the second best. PowerPhotos is a very good third-party application with many useful tools for Photos.

     

    Are you using iCloud Photo Library and have signed up for enough cloud storage to hold the merged libraries?

     

    There is no lossless merging of Photos Libraries other than iCloud Photo Library, and even the merging in iCloud will not include the faces albums and the print products.

    1. Uploading both libraries one after the other to iCloud will merge the libraries in iCloud. It will be like using iCloud Photo Library from multiple Macs, see:  Use Photos and iCloud Photo Library on multiple Mac computers - Apple Support
      Your albums and folders will migrate, keywords, titles, and other metadata. All edited images will be paired with their originals, so you can undo the edits and revert to the original.  The searchable faces names will upload, but not the faces thumbnails and albums. Photos will scan for duplicates while merging. It is the best way to migrate libraries you invested much work into, but uploading large libraries to iCloud requires a paid subscription for more storage than the free 5GB - for at least a month, and it is slow. My library with 40000 photos took a full week to upload.
    2. Merging with PowerPhotos is faster (https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/). It will migrate the metadata and the albums, but you have to decide, if you want to use the originals or the edited versions. So you will either lose the editing work or the high quality originals or create redundancy by merging twice in two passes, once to transfer the originals, and then the edited versions. You will have to add a pass to remove duplicates afterward.  See chapter six in the manual: https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/Help/merging%20libraries.html

    A third option would by to keep both libraries separate and use PowerPhotos to browse the libraries and to transfer selected albums as you go.