I have a large amount of footage from a trip, and since I don't want to sync this to iCloud, I saved it to a non-system Photos library located, in my case, in ~/Pictures/trip.photoslibrary. From iMovie I can browse all my media from the system Photos library located in ~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary. How can I change this so that I can browse the footage from the separate, non-system Photos library in iMovie?
MacBook Pro 16″
As muguy says, only the system photos library will be browsable in iMovie from the iMovie Photos sidebar item.
The easiest way is to go to your non-system Photos library Preferences/General and temporarily make it the system Photos library. Then you can browse its content in iMovie. You can always change back your system photos library to the original.
Another way is to open your non-system Photos library and display it side by side with the iMovie project screen, and then drag whatever photos that you want directly from the Photos library into iMovie.
-- Rich
As muguy says, only the system photos library will be browsable in iMovie from the iMovie Photos sidebar item.
The easiest way is to go to your non-system Photos library Preferences/General and temporarily make it the system Photos library. Then you can browse its content in iMovie. You can always change back your system photos library to the original.
Another way is to open your non-system Photos library and display it side by side with the iMovie project screen, and then drag whatever photos that you want directly from the Photos library into iMovie.
-- Rich
Hmmmm. With either Mojave or Catalina I am able to drag videos and photos from a non-system Photos app library directly into the iMovie timeline. If you are using a later operating system, perhaps the feature has been discontinued.
Be that as it may, you should be able to access your Photos app videos from a system library via the Photos item in the iMovie project sidebar. If you are working from a non-system Photos app library then, as mentioned in an earlier post, you could temporarily designate the non-system library as a system library in the Photos app general preferences. Then restart your Mac and see if you can access through iMovie.
You might consider contacting Apple support and talking to the techs there. They have the capability of remotely accessing your Mac that we cannot do here.
-- Rich
Only the system library will be browsable
You may need to drag to the desktop first, and then into iMovie.
-- Rich
Thanks Rich. I like your second approach, but dragging from Photos into iMovie doesn't work. Trying to drag it into the timeline shows a "not possible" tooltip at the mouse pointer. Trying to drag into the iMovie library just doesn't anything.
Thanks for your help, but that workaround is insane. Dragging to desktop exports the video, which takes considerable time that depends on the video length. I have hundreds of short 120fps 4k video clips. This is not a feasible solution for me.
I have submitted this as a feature request to Apple. I believe this use case - collecting large amounts of raw footage which is converted into a small movie afterwards - is something many people come across. For me, I have imported all 130GB of video into my system Photos library, which has filled up my iCloud completely. For the duration of me working on this movie, iCloud will not be usable for me. After I'm done, I can delete the 130GB again and free up space. It is silly that I have to do this.
A third workaround, keeping the files in a simple filesystem folder outside Photos won't let me quickly skim the videos from the iMovie browser. So that's a no-go for me as well. I can only hope that this is addressed at some point by Apple.
On Ventura drag&drop does not work, unfortunately. Redesignating the system Photos library might work, though I am not sure how the iCloud sync is affected in this case - do you know? Also, I am working with both the non-system and the system libraries. One contains the video footage that should be deleted after my project, the other contains edited photos that I want to keep indefinitely. So even this approach seems cumbersome.
I see no reason to contact Apple techs, they cannot implement a missing feature. Ideally I would like to see not just the "Photos" item under "Libraries" in iMovie, but all non-system Photos libraries as well (or at least those manually added to the project). Then I could seamlessly switch between the libraries. Maybe, someday.
Thanks for all your help though. The workaround I described allows me to finish my project, even though it is not ideal.
Yes, I need to make a correction in my previous post. When I dragged in a video from the Photos app library it looked like it dragged in, but actually came in to the timeline as a still image.
I don't use the cloud with Photos or iMovie so can't safely comment on your iCloud sync question. You might try posting your question on the Photos for Mac Forum, as those folks are extremely knowledgeable about Photos issues and cloud usage re the same.
Good luck with this.
-- Rich
Browsing a separate Photos library from iMovie
