Importing Photos From Windows Live Photo Gallery To iPhoto '11

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Level 1

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Importing Photos From Windows Live Photo Gallery To iPhoto '11

##### Note: I've seen a lot of discussion on this topic but nothing recent, so here it goes #####

Hi -

I am about to receive my new iMac (congratulations to me!) and will soon commense transferring >5,000 photos from my PC. I would like these to transfer into iPhoto.

I've used Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG) to tag these photos by various means (location, person, event, etc). I've read that WLPG stores this metadata with the .jpg file in XMP, or Extensible Metadata Platform. The result is that the tagging data is with the photo file. The tags are in a few categories:

People
Events
Places

Each of these categories will have a number of tags (example: Events include: "Joe's 5th birthday", "Christmas '12", etc)

I understand that iPhoto supports data if it embedded in the ITPC. Reading a bit about iPhoto, there look to be a number of homes for this data (Events, Keywords, etc).

Ideally, I would love to have these photos transferred into iPhoto with consistent tagging. Does anyone know how I can maintain this data into iPhoto? Can anyone recommend a tool for the conversion?

Thanks!

iPhoto '11, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)

Posted on Jul 17, 2013 12:49 PM

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Answer 1

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LarryHN

Level 10

106,110 points

Jul 17, 2013 1:02 PM in response to pjherro

Basically iPhoto will use what you give it in the IPTC and EXIF fields - there is no place for "people" - you would wand to assign a key word for each person - with iPhoto places are identified by Lat/Long - how are you identifying place and how will it be placed in the EXIF data? - events again would be identified by keyword (in iPhoto the default and best way is leaving "events" as bunches of photos by time and using albums and folders (which hold albums or other folers) to organize

LN

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Answer 2

pjherro Author

Level 1

9 points

Jul 18, 2013 3:28 AM in response to LarryHN

Thanks LN. Does anyone know how to move the tagged metadata from the XMP to the IPTC and EXIF fields? I'm looking for a simple tool.

Thanks!

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Answer 3

pjherro Author

Level 1

9 points

Jul 19, 2013 9:03 PM in response to pjherro

Update-I was able to do some testing. The WLPG tags do come over as keywords in iPhoto. Now all I have to do is figure out the People tags. I like the keyword idea though LN as a backup,

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Answer 4

Jul 9, 2014 8:12 AM in response to pjherro

My Windows pc crashed and I'm thinking about replacing with the Mac Mini. But like you, I have thousands of tagged photos in Windows Live Gallery. Losing the tags is a non-starter. I really don't care too much about "where" the photo was taken, but I do care about "who" is in the photo and what "event" was occurring when the photo was taken. For example, one photo could be tagged with my daughter's name, my son's name, my wife's name, event of Disneyworld, and the date taken should be just embedded in the photo itself. So four tags for the one photo plus the embedded date taken.

If I migrate to iPhoto on the Mac, will I be able to bring all of those individual tags over easily? What was your final experience now that you've been messing with it for a year? And if you are happy, are you able to sort all you photos by just clicking a person's name and a date range and having iPhoto return all photos with that one person within those dates?

Any insight would be helpful. Thanks.

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