Reverting to iPhoto after Photos migration

Feel free to store it wherever you choose, I would not, but it's not my Library so losing it would not affect me.

Like a lot of things in tech, Dropbox has its share of doubters and haters. Meanwhile, the world moves on. There are no good technical reasons - really no reasons at all - why you shouldn't use it to store important data. Dropbox has been upgraded nicely over time. It does a great job of storing what you need for however, wherever and whenever you need it.

The issue at hand is how to migrate iPhoto libraries to a product better/friendlier/more robust than Apple's unfortunate Photo. MediaPro 1 doesn't cut it. During import attempt #1, it stalled halfway through the import and crashed, dumping everything it brought over. During attempt #2, it imported my collection successfully but headed south when I started sorting. Of course it dumped the entire transfer. Fail.

The MediaPro debacle showed, at least, that Photo's mea culpa - I can't import your iPhoto collection because I can't find the metadata for two-thirds of it - is the BS I thought. I've contacted Apple about it. No reply so far.

PhotoDirector 6 is on deck. I hope it gets here today. I'll let you know how it does.

> Feel free to store it wherever you choose, I would not, but it's not my Library so losing it would not affect me.

I did already. I just wanted to know more about this topic. I do informal computer support in my company also, so knowing the reasons can always help trouble shoot down the road or just to keep an eye on it.

On the other hand, my experience and other reported cases indicate it's ok to put the whole library on Dropbox (or Box for that matter).

Have you personally copied an iPhoto Library to the Dropbox and restored it back from the online copy and run it? If you put a library in your Dropbox folder on your Mac and run it from there it's on a properly formatted drive. The key is to recover the library from the online copy and see if it runs as it should.

The reason simply is that Dropbox is synchronous storage (assuming that you have a Dropbox folder in Finder), databases and synchronous storage can have issues.

My personal reason is having watched Dropbox lie to a congressional enquiry regarding data store security and only get caught when one of their own staff turned whistleblower I have no faith in them. There are plenty of alternative vendors who don't lie.

Dear Kappy:

We get it. We will never, ever criticize Apple. We are just lowly customers and we will remember our place.

For the record. Photos is awful. I have given it a try and reverted to Aperture. Since Apple is also abandoning Aperture, I'm exporting everything to use in Lightroom. Lightroom, by the way, also runs on Windows.

wgposwego wrote:

We get it. We will never, ever criticize Apple. We are just lowly customers and we will remember our place.

For the record. Photos is awful. I have given it a try and reverted to Aperture. Since Apple is also abandoning Aperture, I'm exporting everything to use in Lightroom. Lightroom, by the way, also runs on Windows.

Photos was/is not a replacement for Aperture, I am surprised that you even considered that it might be frankly. It is the replacement for iPhoto, as was clearly stated by Apple.

Aperture is not being replaced as far as we know.

> The issue at hand is how to migrate iPhoto libraries to a product better/friendlier/more robust than Apple's unfortunate Photo.

I agree. To me, a couple of years back, Aperture was the answer. But we all know what happened.

For casual users, I wouldn't recommend Lightroom even though I use it myself (being masochistic, haha). Photos actually is better than iPhotos in someways (better editing tools, multiple libraries, syncing etc). But Apple botched the transition process.

And then there's this whole iCloud syncing confusion. Do I need both My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Library on? What happens if some of my devices have one, some have the other, or both? What happens when I delete stuff from one device when the sync is off, and I turn it back on later? How do I sync some photos but not others?

Does anyone know of a place that clearly and comprehensively explain all this?

Richard

> Have you personally copied an iPhoto Library to the Dropbox and restored it back from the online copy and run it?

Not exactly 'restored' but it perfectly sync'ed from one Mac to another Mac and vise versa. I have one Mac at work and one at home and I can add photos from either computer and it would show up on the other computer.

I recall a conversation years ago with the owner of a huge commercial construction contractor. My friend was complaining about every general contractor for which he had worked. The list was impressive.

"So, Ed," said I, posing a question his comments demanded, "Why do you keep bidding to guys who burn you?"

He grinned. "Because if I didn't, I'd be out of business."

His point was that no general contractor (of that time - it probably remains the same) treats every sub or supplier fairly even most of the time. Of course, I was hearing just one side of a common argument.

If we bought products only from companies with impeccable morals (perception differs from researched fact, of course), we would still be creating fire by scratching stones together.

Richard3030 wrote:

And then there's this whole iCloud syncing confusion. Do I need both My Photo Stream and iCloud Photo Library on?

If all of your devices/Macs support the iCloud Photo Library there is no need to have PhotoStream on, if you have a pre Yosemite Mac or an IOS device earlier than IOS8 then you should leave it on for compatibility.

Richard3030 wrote:

What happens when I delete stuff from one device when the sync is off, and I turn it back on later? How do I sync some photos but not others?

You need to understand that there is no 'sync' you have one photo library, it's on iCloud and all clients read from and write to it, if you delete a photo from the library then all devices will read that, if they are not connected when it happened, it will happen when they connect.

Richard3030 wrote:

How do I sync some photos but not others?

Only put the ones you want in the iCloud Library in the iCloud Library

But we can make a personal choice based on their past history, and I have, in addition to the main reason I do not advise storing Photo or iPhoto (or iTunes) libraries on synchronized storage.

I hope that's clear?

Richard3030 wrote:

> Have you personally copied an iPhoto Library to the Dropbox and restored it back from the online copy and run it?

Not exactly 'restored' but it perfectly sync'ed from one Mac to another Mac and vise versa. I have one Mac at work and one at home and I can add photos from either computer and it would show up on the other computer.

By having 2 Macs reading and writing to the same database your chances of index or data corruption are high, please be careful. Start by actually downloading the copy on Dropbox, for it is the one that you will need in an emergency and if you have only used the local copies you have not tested it.

FYI, take a look at a genuine sync service, SugarSync, if you attempt to upload a database to it you get some warnings. 1, synchronization will be disabled, only uploads will be allowed, 2, simultaneous access will be disabled, multiple user profiles will only be allowed if the app sports it natively. This includes iPhoto, Photos, iTunes as well as some 3rd party databases, such as Filemaker.

You are taking risks in my opinion.

Not exactly 'restored' but it perfectly sync'ed from one Mac to another Mac and vise versa.

That's not the same as storing a backup library online and that's what we're talking about.

I've used Dropbox for syncing between two Macs but great care must be taken so as not to have two user access the library and make changes at the same time or user #2 start in on the library before the changes make buy user #1 have fully been synced. It's iffy at best if it for more than one user rather than one user on two different machines.

Thanks for the helpful explanation, Csound1. Like many, I have a giant Photos library on my Mac. Since I I don't want my phone to have that giant library, I would turn off iCloud Photo Library on my phone and leave the Photo Stream on. The question is, how do I move only some photos from the big library to Photos on my phone?