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Old TM backups and a new MBP

Good morning, all. My daughter is the proud owner of a shiny, new Macbook Pro. She wants to browse her old photos, but they are sitting in old iPhoto libraries embedded in old Time Machines backups on an external drive. I attempted to import a library into Photos, but couldn't due to permissions (or lack thereof).


How does she access her old photos without importing them onto her new laptop (space is limited)?


If importing them into Photos is the only way, how do I overcome the permissions issue?


Is there any way to consolidate these libraries to make life easier?


Thanks in advance!

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Jul 7, 2015 8:12 AM

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Posted on Jul 7, 2015 8:51 AM

You may have been better served by getting an older laptop with a larger hard drive option. Your best bet probably is to get an external Firewire or Thunderbolt drive to store all the photos on. You can drag the Pictures folder onto that hard drive, and then open Photos with the command and option key to pick the photo library from the Pictures folder. Mind you, once you rebuild with Photos, you may not be able to reopen with iPhoto.

If you have iPhoto on your new notebook, it would be better to do the same rebuild with iPhoto instead of Photos.

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Question marked as Best reply

Jul 7, 2015 8:51 AM in response to Ymees

You may have been better served by getting an older laptop with a larger hard drive option. Your best bet probably is to get an external Firewire or Thunderbolt drive to store all the photos on. You can drag the Pictures folder onto that hard drive, and then open Photos with the command and option key to pick the photo library from the Pictures folder. Mind you, once you rebuild with Photos, you may not be able to reopen with iPhoto.

If you have iPhoto on your new notebook, it would be better to do the same rebuild with iPhoto instead of Photos.

Old TM backups and a new MBP

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