Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Remove ALL photos and videos from Mac and start again.

Our photos and videos are a massive mess of almost a TB, spread randomly across two MBPs and two external drives, caused by hurriedly and badly backing up many times in different places, general lack of organisation and a total lack of knowing what we're doing. I have several iPhoto, Aperture and now Photos libraries, as well as iMovie projects, photos and videos in many different formats and duplicates galore. I have cleaned the duplicates within each location (the two Macs and the two drives), but there are going to be many thousands between these locations (that's the nature of backups I guess!) whenever I can finally consolidate them all.


The problem is that the mess is too big to put anything together in one place and we're completely overwhelmed; what I'm thinking of doing is getting one enormous external drive, finding all of the files in Finder, saving them to the drive, removing them from the computers altogether and starting again by putting them all in one place - Aperture on the bigger MBP. This will allow me to sort out duplicates, add geotags and generally clean up before importing everything to Photos.


Two questions: 1. Is this a good idea? 2. How do I find all of these files on my MBP? I have so many different formats - most in (now migrated) Photos libraries and many others just in folders (I was going to search by file extension for the latter).

MacBook Pro (15-inch Early 2011), Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Jun 28, 2015 12:03 AM

Reply
5 replies

Jun 28, 2015 12:30 AM in response to Mandyvan77

I have cleaned the duplicates within each location (the two Macs and the two drives), but there are going to be many thousands between these locations (that's the nature of backups I guess!) whenever I can finally consolidate them all.

Could you explain more? I do not understand why you delete duplicates from backups. A backup is supposed to be a duplicate. I would on no account delete the first backups I made right after importing your photos from the camera. And it pays to have more than one backup of the photos. I had several times to revert to the first backup, when I discovered jpeg corruptions caused by bad disk blocks and the newer backups were showing the same corruptions.


The problem is that the mess is too big to put anything together in one place and we're completely overwhelmed; what I'm thinking of doing is getting one enormous external drive, finding all of the files in Finder, saving them to the drive, removing them from the computers altogether and starting again by putting them all in one place - Aperture on the bigger MBP. This will allow me to sort out duplicates, add geotags and generally clean up before importing everything to Photos.

Consolidating your libraries in Aperture is a good idea. You can use Aperture to merge all iPhoto or Aperture libraries into one big library. Merging libraries is better than exporting the photos and adreimporting. If you just export the photos you will have to do all editing and meta data tagging again.

If you merge the photo libraries by importing the older libraries into a new library your titles, ratings, captions, faces, location, edits, etc will be saved.

Aperture 3.3: How to use Aperture to merge iPhoto libraries


You could then run Photo Sweeper or a similar tool to find duplicates in your merged library.

Jun 28, 2015 4:03 AM in response to léonie

Thanks for your help Leonie.


By cleaning up duplicates, I meant duplicates of photos in the backups - after years of creating untidy backups just to be on the safe side I have duplicates of duplicates, usually just two but I even found eleven copies of one photo and six of one video (you can imagine how much space this is wasting). I've basically backed up backups without realising. My aim is to have one copy of every photo and every video I have on my hard drive on an external drive, and also a copy of everything on the cloud.


Aperture is a good idea, except that my photos have now all been imported into the new Photos and I'm not sure how to go back from here. I don't know if it works this way around - Photos won't recognise any changes made in Aperture now, not even newly imported photos, so I don't think it will work unless I start again completely.

Jun 28, 2015 4:27 AM in response to Mandyvan77

All your photos are now in Photos?

Aperture cannot read your Photos library. You can use the "Share > Export to Aperture" command to import your photos from Photos to Aperture. If you export all photos now from your library to a new Aperture library on a backup drive and then routinely use "Export to Aperture" for any new photos you will have a second library with all your photos.


Apple recommends two ways to make backups of your Photos Library: Time Machine and copying the Photos Library to an external drive. If you use cloning software to copy your library to an external drive you can incrementally update the cloned library, so ccessive backups will be faster than the first backup.


Back up your Photos library

Remove ALL photos and videos from Mac and start again.

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple ID.