I used iCloud. My main Photos library is on iCloud so I can view my photos from all of my devices. I have three historical Photos libraries on my Mac. How can I merge them with the Photos library on iCloud creating one main library? I would like to go this in such a way that I preserve the individual albums in all of the libraries? Thank you in anticipation of your help.
iPhone 8, iOS 15
To merge your libraries in iCloud you would just have to make all your additional historical libraries your current iCloud Photos Libraries in turn.
Whenever we make an additional Photos Library our system Photos Library and enable iCloud Photo for it, the photos ans albums from this library will be uploaded into our current iCloud Photos Library and the albums, folders, media items will be merged into the existing library. iCloud will check for duplicates and solve conflicts between existing duplicates.
The merged library will sync back from iCloud into your currently open Photos Library.
This procedure should give you the result you want. But I strongly recommend to make backup copies of all your libraries, before you merge them, just in case something should go wrong and you may need to revert to the previous state. And it will be a very slow procedure, as the merging into the existing library will take a long time.
The only thing missing after you merge the libraries in iCloud will be your projects, as iCloud Photos does not sync projects between your devices.
Thank you. Do I make the historical Photos Library the current library in the Photos app on my Mac or do I login to iCloud.com and change the library preference online? For how long do I keep the historical Photos Library the current library? Minutes, hours or days?
Merging Photos libraries
