Moving video from Photos to iMovie

Hi,

There are three ways of transferring videos from the Photos app into iMovie.

You can drag the videos directly from the Photos app library into an iMovie event or project.

From within the Photos app you can do a File/Export of the videos to a folder on your desktop and from there drag them into an iMovie event or project.

You can click on the Photos item in the iMovie media sidebar of a project, and drag the videos into iMovie. (For this to work your Photos app library must be designated as the system photo library in the Photos app general preferences.

However, you probably are better off leaving your videos in the Photos app, either independently or in addition to iMovie. They are much more accessible there and the Photos app has many more tools than iMovie for organizing the Photos, for example, into smart albums, ordinary albums, sorting, adding keywords, and even trimming. Whereas in iMovie the videos will be more difficult to access and organize and, if your iMovie library becomes corrupted, as sometimes happens, there is a risk of losing your media. So if you store your videos in the iMovie library, it would be wise to have a Time Machine backup of the library, in addition to having a Time Machine backup of your Photos library and additionally storing a backup of your photos and videos in a Finder folder.

Also, what some experienced people do is to create a backup of their Photos library with Time Machine, and also store duplicates of their photos and videos in a Finder folder. That way if the photos library becomes corrupted you will not lose your media. If you want, you can also store duplicates in your iMovie library, but it should not be the only place that you store your videos.

-- Rich