I have an old iMac running OS 10.12.6, the browser does not support iCloud. I want to copy all the images from Photos onto a new MacBook. Is there a way to do this? Any help is gratefully received.
iPhone 12, iOS 26
Are the photos on the old iMac stored in a Photos Library? Then copy the complete Photos Library onto an external drive, as described here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
Then you can copy the library from the external drive to the pictures folder on your new Mac and open it there in Photos.
Your old Mac should support iCloud Photos, btw. iCloud Photos has been introduced with OSX 10.10.3 Yosemite.
Are the photos on the old iMac stored in a Photos Library? Then copy the complete Photos Library onto an external drive, as described here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
Then you can copy the library from the external drive to the pictures folder on your new Mac and open it there in Photos.
Your old Mac should support iCloud Photos, btw. iCloud Photos has been introduced with OSX 10.10.3 Yosemite.
Thank you all for your helpful replies. I have, indeed, upgraded my iCloud storage. I opened Photos on the old-old Mac and in the settings selected the option to store all 13,000 images on iCloud (roughly 50Gb). It took several hours. Then I came to the new Mac Neo, opened Photos and selected the option to save all the images to the new hard drive. Now I just need to work out how to remove them all (or even if I want to do that) from iCloud and go back to my 99p monthly subscription. I'm weighing up the options of either £36 a year for storage, or £?? to buy an external drive which I'll have to manually upload to on a regular basis and which, as has happened to my existing drive, can be unreliable. I think I've talked myself into an answer!!
An OS10 Library can't be used directly in OS26 or 27-- so when you open it in Photos, there will be a wait while the Library is upgraded to handle all the new stuff. Then that OS27 Library will not be usable at all on the OS10 Mac. So don't erase the copies you make, at least for a while.
Be sure to use an external drive that is formatted as either APFS format or Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format for your Library copies.
On the other hand, if you connect to your iCloud and use iCloud Photos, the pictures will be copied to iCloud.com, and then they will be available to any other device connected to your account with no worries about versions.
This might come in handy:
Understanding iCloud Photos - Apple Community
léonie wrote:
Your old Mac should support iCloud Photos, btw. iCloud Photos has been introduced with OSX 10.10.3 Yosemite.
These days, iCloud Photos requires macOS 10.14 (Mojave) or later.
System requirements for iCloud - Apple Support
I wasn't expecting the requirement to be quite that high, so I looked at a September 7 copy of the article on The Wayback Machine site. The article available on that date (published November 03, 2025) indicated that macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) was the minimum requirement for iCloud as a whole, and iCloud Photos in particular.
Thank you. I did attempt this, but my equally elderly 1TB external drive has decided to stop working too! Which now makes me a little nervous about relying on external drives for long-term backups... While £2.99 a month for iCloud storage isn't a fortune, I think it's my only option.
sambland109 wrote: …my equally elderly 1TB external drive has decided to stop working too! Which now makes me a little nervous about relying on external drives for long-term backups... While £2.99 a month for iCloud storage isn't a fortune, I think it's my only option.
I've had several hard drives go "dead parrot" on me, and the lesson is that we can't rely on a single hard drive, or even just one form of backup. Everything at iCloud should be backed up to a hard drive, and vice versa.
iCloud is a limited sort of backup, since, as a mirror of our Macs, we can't really go back to before we made mistakes. A Time Machine drive is the way to help with that. But iCloud serves as non-local storage incase of disaster.
In addition, I have separate Archive backups that I only use periodically. They are 10 TB 3.5 inch spinning drives, old, slow, but different from the other backups.
So I've decided that one hard drive just isn't enough. Unfortunately, they've gotten rather more expensive in the last couple of years.
Transfer Photos images from iMac (OS 10.12.6) to new MacBook
