iPhotos to photos

There are no 32 bit or 64 bit drives. There are 32 bit and 64 bit systems and software.

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What is the Mac model and year are the two Macs?

What system is running on each of the Macs?

Where is the library currently located? If on an external drive how is the drive formatted and connected to the Mac.

You have waited a bit too long to save your iPhoto Libraries to a different application.

The last system version, where we simply could open an iPhoto Library in the successor, the Photos.app, and create a new library from it, has been macOS 12 Monterey. That has been simple and easy. Photos could create a new library with all albums and most metadata, and we could not only migrate the photos and videos, but also the structure of the iPhoto Library to Photos. This door for a simle migration has been closed by the upgrade to Ventura.

On your current system version the only option left is to launch the Photos.app, let it create a new Photos Library, if you do not yet have a Photos Library and then import each iPhoto Library into your Photos Library.

• In Photos use the command "File > Import ⇧⌘i",
• Then select one of your iPhoto Libraries and click "Review for Import".
• You will now see a dialog, where you can select all new photos, that are not yet in your Photos Library.

This will let you save the photos from your iPhoto Libraries, but not the structure of the library, also the keywords, titles, locations will be lost, if they have not been embedded in the originals as IPTC or EXIF tags.

starchipjr wrote:

the hard drive is out of a 2011 Mac pro laptop running High Sierra (?).

That's the problem. Most of the apps before Catalina were 32 bit and are no longer supported by Catalina or newer systems. Then must be 64 bit apps. You can use the free app GO64 to check the apps on that drive to see which are 32 bit and which are 64 bit.

I would erase and reformat that drive to APFS with Ownership set to be ignored and use it for additional storage and use. You will need to get updates for any 32 bit apps that you need or alternatives like LibreOffice and SoftMaker FreeOffice 2018 for MS Office apps.