How can I recover lost photos, albums and events when migrating a Photo library to another mac?

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How can I recover lost photos, albums and events when migrating a Photo library to another mac?

I have attempted to migrate a large Photo library (containing prior iPhoto content and Albums and Events) from a 2009 Mac running OSX El Capitan 10.11.1 to a 2013 Mac running OSX Catalina 10.15.7. There was a Photo library running on the 'Catalina Mac'.

I have used Migration assistant and the bulk of the photos have transferred and successfully added to the Photo library already existing on that Mac. However the bulk of the prior iPhoto material has disappeared and the little remaining is scattered throughout the rest of the photos with little metadata and different dates to the original photos. No Album's or Events have transferred.

To re-create the Albums and Event and patch up the missing photos in any manual way will be a huge task.

I would appreciate advice on this problem.

To recreate what I had

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Mar 25, 2022 10:05 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

muguy

Level 10

82,123 points

Mar 25, 2022 10:18 PM in response to mac-problems

Notes on Migrating an iPhoto Library from… - Apple Community

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Answer 2

mac-problems Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 28, 2022 9:37 PM in response to muguy

Hi muguy,

Thank you very much for that comprehensive advice. In reading it I realised there was a great hole in my knowledge of Photos and the implications of moving my library from iPhoto about 6 years ago. Having done that in about 2016 I continued to create Albums to easily view content and had the old iPhoto events still listed on my 2009 Mac running El Capitan 10.11.1. I had the back-up for that Mac on a DROBO directly connected. I cannot recall whether I had correctly formatted the drive, however I did not have any problems using the library for many years. The Photo library was on the hard drive.

The problems I have recently encountered arose when I tried to migrate the Photo library on that 2009 Mac running El Capitan to a 2013 Mac running Catalina 10.15.7. To achieve that I disconnected the DROBO and directly connected the two Macs and used Migration assistant.

I am still trying to ascertain the amount of photo data not transferred - some may have been located under date transferred rather than date taken.

While I am coming to grips with the issues involved in the in-complete data migration I am being educated via your advice.

For that I thank you again. In the meantime I have decided to retain the 2009 Mac with it's set up and Photo library as a fall back resource.

Thank you, Rob

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How can I recover lost photos, albums and events when migrating a Photo library to another mac?

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