Transferring photos from iPhoto and Photos to Lightroom

You've been misinformed about Lightroom. It certainly does preserve the Original. I'll be blunt: there are many excellent reasons to migrate to LR. It's a very capable pro-level app, but saving disk space is not one of them.

There is no way to "transfer" images from iPhoto or Photos to LR. You have two possibilities:

1. The latest version of LR has an option to import iPhoto and Aperture Libraries. See the Adobe website for more

2. You can export your Photos from iPhoto / Photos to folders in the Finder. What happens thereafter is up to you.

This User Tip

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4921

has details of the options in the Export dialogue.

In Photos select the photos you want to "transfer", then from the File menu choose one of the Export commands. Move them where you want, then in Lightroom select the IMPORT button, point to the location where the exported photos are, select if you want them all or just new ones, and then click the IMPORT button (now moved to the right side).

Although you didn't want to go into the why, but I understand your decision. 😟 I love the features of iPhoto and have been using for over 12 years. Photos right now is too immature and is very slow for my 36,000+ photos unless I buy a new Mac with large SSD. I've invested so much tagging faces and location, I am not quite ready to abandon it yet. I was just about to go to Aperture just before it was announced to be discontinued. I am going to hopefully wait a few years for Photos to mature, if not I don't know if I would go to Lightroom. The #1 reason I have a Mac was for iPhotos/Aperture and iMovie/Final Cut. If they do the same with iMovie/Final Cut, we lost the main drive for Macs😟

Why not staying with iPhoto? It still runs perfectly well in Yosemite, and as far I can guess now also in ElCapitan.

More important than the specs on paper, is what you are used to use.

Lex

I plan to stay with it as long as possible. Ultimately, it won't be supported: no updates for new raw cameras, it won't be available on App Store to install on new computers, and / or it won't install or run on new OS.

Also, I wouldn't say perfect. I am having problems with video thumbnails, it's corrupt and rebuilding it has not worke. But it's a **** a lot better than Photos.

As long as you update Cameraraw (last update 18 aug).

You can move it to new macs from yours, i suppose it will run perfectly well in ElCapitan also.

Hmm.. My MacPro from 2008 is still on 10.9 so I stopped getting Cameraraw updates. My other machines on Yosemite/ElCapitan does and runs iPhoto fine. My MacPro is our main, important machine with constantly growing drives. (The power to update the machine has really prolonged the life of that machine.) There has been no advantage on that old machine upto now to be updated. I think its time to evaluate updating it. I did remember one of my programs did not run on ElCapitan public beta.

This tread is drifting away from the original poster. I should go to the Aperture group to see the general consensus since iPhoto is discontinued, whether it would pay for me to use Aperture. It seems to be able to work concurrently with iPhoto to some degree. I wish Photos did. I was just about to go over to it when it was discontinued. I strangely do own it.

Why should Cameraraw not be updated on your mac?

They are not updating it for the older Mac OS. When I manually obtain the update 6.06, it says it requires 10.10 when I try and install it. I'm still get the Pro Video Formats updates for the older OS.

I haven't looked at LR for a while, but we use iPhoto for quick non-destructive edits. Real complex edits, I use Photoshop. When Photoshop updates the photo in the same directory, and the file date changes, iPhoto then updates the database. I believe LR is basically another non-destructive editor. You have to overwrite the original (copy) file to get iPhoto to know there's an update.

Robbie, LTR is super. BUT Adobe is now going for the cloud too: the LTR6.1 Standalone (which I have) is probably an end version, they want everybody in the subscription model (brings in a lot more money). Even the Dehaze filter is now "demonstratively" only for the subscription model. Luckily there are a lot of user filters that you can use.

I have looked for an alternative but iPhoto and Aperture support is stopped, I have difficulty to get used to Gimp.

Bridge+Elements may stay standalone, but it is a degradeation from LTR.

Sad,

Lex