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Photos App

I have over 16,000 pictures on my Imac. Thousands of which are not in my Photos App. Also the many albums are misnamed or empty. I would like to organize and rename the many folders in Pictures and then delete my Photos App and start over by importing the folders as albums. Is there a way to do that?

Thanks

Alex

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jun 22, 2022 10:42 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 22, 2022 11:46 PM

Hi


Yes - in photos, library view, select all, then image>delete. Go to the recently deleted folder and do the same. You photos library is now empty.


Organise your photos in pictures, as you like using finder, then in photos import them using file>import. MAKE SURE you select the "keep folder organistion" checkbox.



However: - In photos you will get one folder AND one album for each folder in your file import.


In my opinion it is much easier to first import all the images into photos, and then do the organisation in there. Photos has all the views and tools to make this easy, finder does not. Plus you can use albums in place of folders for your lowest level part of the structure, avoiding additional clicks when navigating them.

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2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 22, 2022 11:46 PM in response to AlexM42

Hi


Yes - in photos, library view, select all, then image>delete. Go to the recently deleted folder and do the same. You photos library is now empty.


Organise your photos in pictures, as you like using finder, then in photos import them using file>import. MAKE SURE you select the "keep folder organistion" checkbox.



However: - In photos you will get one folder AND one album for each folder in your file import.


In my opinion it is much easier to first import all the images into photos, and then do the organisation in there. Photos has all the views and tools to make this easy, finder does not. Plus you can use albums in place of folders for your lowest level part of the structure, avoiding additional clicks when navigating them.

Jun 23, 2022 6:30 AM in response to TonyCollinet

Thanks Tony. I think I'll do it the first way. I can't see importing 16,000 pictures and then trying to create so many albums. In Pictures they are already in folders. I need to combine many folders but that just involves dragging and dropping many at once into one folder and then delete the empty folders. I did this the day before yesterday and it took most of the day. But yesterday all those changes were undone and it was back to many folders I had deleted. I have to figure out how that happened before proceeding.

Photos App

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