Migrating from iPhoto to Photo

I don’t know what anyone else's experience has been doing the migration, but I found it hellish.

I have about 13,000 pictures which were arranged in 255 albums. When they were in iPhoto these albums were all neatly ordered ( not necessarily in time sequence, but as the ’story’ of the album demanded) and each photo labelled - an easy enough task with iPhoto, using Batch Rename. Added to which you could control the order photos appeared in either by time taken (useful if you’re amalgamating several people’s photos of one event like a family christmas) or by title. In other words, whatever its other faults, I found iPhoto pretty easy to use for what I wanted.

So you can imagine my horror when I’d downloaded Photo as part of the recent upgrade to Yosemite that although my photos still appeared in the same albums, their order had reverted to when they had been taken and, worse, that for some reason the titles that I had given to each picture only sometimes showed up under the photo. This meant that in order to re-arrange the photos in their original order in each album, I had to consult the information panel for each photo which did have the original title and then drag them into the right position. A major, major pain in the arse. But worse was to come. I need to have the title of each photo appear under it in the album, not be hidden away in a separate panel. But to do that in Photo you have to label each photo individually because in their wisdom Apple have suppressed Batch Rename. And that really is quite inexcuseable and a major, major, major pain the arse.

I just wish I’d known that I could have gone on using iPhoto regardless and ditched the new app! The trouble is that in the course of the migration I spent a lot of time refining my albums and if I revert to iPhoto I lose all that work. And I do like the revamp of Faces. So there I am between a rock and a hard place, until Apple reinstate Batch Rename.

Maxdot