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During a recent 6 month trip I created over 200 albums on my MacBook Pro using PHOTOS. All photos were edited and had titles and descriptions in the metadata. I now what to transfer the ALBUMS including the edited photos directly to my iMac at home. How do I do this and keep the titles, metadata, and editing that I have spent hours doing?
MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.14
Export each album of photos to a folder of the same name as shown in this screenshot:
Then import the folders into the iMac library with the option to keep the folder organization:
For each folder imported your will have a folder containing an album both with the same name as the imported folder.
The XML file will assure all of the metadata gets imported with the images. The one part of the library you won't get is any edited images.
OR with the paid version of PowerPhotos you can select the albums in Library B and copy them to Library A while keeping all of the metadata intact. Again you'll have to choose between edited and original versions. My take on that is you can always re-edit but you can recover any image portion that you may have edited or cropped out.
Export each album of photos to a folder of the same name as shown in this screenshot:
Then import the folders into the iMac library with the option to keep the folder organization:
For each folder imported your will have a folder containing an album both with the same name as the imported folder.
The XML file will assure all of the metadata gets imported with the images. The one part of the library you won't get is any edited images.
OR with the paid version of PowerPhotos you can select the albums in Library B and copy them to Library A while keeping all of the metadata intact. Again you'll have to choose between edited and original versions. My take on that is you can always re-edit but you can recover any image portion that you may have edited or cropped out.
I still am missing a key piece of information on how I link my two computers to get my ALBUMS from one to another.
I am sure that I can like the two computers with a hard cable but have not figured out how to easily move ALBUMS intact.
Use Target Disk Mode. Once you have the two Macs connected use PowerPhotos to copy the album from Library A to Library B.
How is the external HD formatted and connected to your Mac?
When you start up your MacBook Pro in Target Disk mode as described here (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201462) and connect it with a cable to your iMac, your iMac will see the system drive of your MacBook Pro as an external drive. The Photos Library on your MacBook Pro needs to be in folder, where you have read-write access. Then PowerPhotos can access it to extract albums. But it would be much easier, if you copied the library from your MacBook Pro to an external drive that you plug into your iMac. This has the advantage, that you can set the Ignore Ownership on this volume flag for the drive and will not have problems with permission issues.
Have you found the user manual for PowerPhotos? The page on copying albums is here: https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/Docs/copy_albums.html
The following is how PowerPhotos will do the copying:
If you've cropped any images for special purposes you might want to move them to a special album and then have that album copies as originals since edits can be redone.
Thank you very much. Since I took nearly 12,000 photos which I edited, I want to keep the edited version. If I understand you correctly I would need to purchase PowerPhotos to copy albums in Library B and save the albums in Library A. This sounds like the easier path for me. I really appreciate your help. Thanks again
Greg
Power Photos can transfer both, the edited versions or the originals. But if you transfer both, one after the other, you will have duplicates. A compromise would be to transfer the edited versions with Power Photos to your iMac, and to copy the complete library from your MacBook Pro to an external drive to save it. This way you will have easy access to the originals, if you decide you need to modify the edits.
I am using iCloud Photos to transfer the edited versions with all metadata between my Macs. This way I can undo all adjustments individually, and even the named faces are transferring. PowerPhotos can transfer nearly everything, but the faces are still a problem.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my question. I have emailed a few questions to Power Photos and am awaiting their answers. I still am missing a key piece of information on how I link my two computers to get my ALBUMS from one to another. I have such large photo file on my iMac that I would need to buy a lot of extra cloud space to store all of my photos in the cloud.
I am sure that I can like the two computers with a hard cable but have not figured out how to easily move ALBUMS intact.
I also have a large Photos library (over 85K photos/videos that take up about 725GB) but I liked access on all our Apple stuff (tow iMacs, two iPhones and two iPads), so I pay the monthly fee to have more iCloud storage. (I was paying for another off site service that decided to quit the consumer market and even though iCloud Photos is not a true backup service - it is technically a syncing service - it serves my needs.)
Your other option would be to follow Old Toad's instructions for exporting the albums but then copy them to an external HD and use the external HD to then copy them to your home computer.
I used your advice and copied my PhotosLibrary from my MBPro onto an external hard drive. I then bought the full version on PowerPhoto and was able to get my PhotosLibrary from my external HD onto PowerPhoto on my iMac. I have not been able to figure out how to drag and drop the ALBUMS I want that I can see in PowerPhoto to my master PhotosLibrary file on my iMac with all the editing and meta data in tact.
I am only able to copy one album at a time and only the "Original" version of each photo shows up. It takes 15 minutes to copy one album with 6 photos to my Master PhotosLibrary.
You showed me a screen with "Option 4" that seems to let me select "Edited" photos but I have not been able to find that screen.
Also, when I drop and drag multiple albums, only one of those albums gets transferred. I have 200 albums with maybe 10,000 photos to transfer to my Master Album. Any suggestions on how to accomplish the rest of this task would be appreciated.
My external HD is wired with a USB-c cable to my iMac. It is formatted for Mac. The PowerPhotos shows my entire Photos library from my MBPro. All good this far. When I drag multiple albums from the PowerPhotos library into my Master PhotosLibrary on my iMac, only non-edited photos come over. I am dragging my SELECT Albums which all have edited photos. However, non-edited photos come over. You showed me a screen labelled 4. OPTION that I cannot find that would allow me to select edited photos.
Also, no matter how many ALBUMS I drag and drop, only one ALBUM comes over to my Master PhotosLibrary file on my iMac. It takes perhaps 15 minutes for that one album to show up.
So, it seems I have two issues. only non-edited photos transfer and only one ALBUM at a time transfers.
Thanks again for all of your help,
Greg
There are two areas where you can set what's copied:
1 - in PowerPhotos/Copying preference pane:
2 - in the Merge Libraries window:
Transferring ALBUMS in PHOTOS on a MacBook Pro to ALBUMS in PHOTOS on an iMac
