Transfer my pictures out of Photos library

allensia wrote:

I have 30,000 pics. How do you select them all at one time. Everyone makes this export sound so easy, but it is NOT!

Select 1 and next use the Command + A keys. This will select all.

Yes, just use the Export feature in Photos. Select the pictures you want to Export and then select File Export and the rest is very intuitive. If you shoot your photos in Raw then select Unmodified Original.

Question: what am I supposed to do with a lifetime of photographs locked into Library files of PHOTOS? Does Apple own my files because I paid them a fair amount of my money in exchange for my machine?

As long as it is only physically on your computer they are strictly your photos.

If you were to sell the machine, a secure wipe is recommended in event anyone wanted to recover data and found copies of your photos. You could also use EXIF editor to incorporate a copyright remark within your photos. http://www.lemkesoft.com/ GraphicConverter lets you batch edit EXIF info which can be transferred between platforms. Mind you, if you want to make sure they transfer store them as a ZIP archive within their own folder before them are moved to another platform. Try to save at minimum the created dates in their own cataloged folder. I.e. have a March folder, inside a 2016 folder within the Finder. Other meta data such as keywords and Albums from Photos will be lost when moved from one platform to another. See my FAQ* on selling Macs:

http://www.macmaps.com/selling.html

Does anybody know how to extract FILES,sweet little jpegs containing info when the pic was taken, from the belly of the LIBRARY monster? What if I wanted them on PC (please don't tell me I'm supposed to export all 24000+ one by one, that just would not be an intelligent answer).

File menu -> Export lets you Export the selection of Photos from the Photos App. So the trick would be to make a customized folder or Album, and then select all the photos from the folder or Album, making sure the View menu is showing the Sidebar, so your grouped cataloged photos are together in a group you desire before doing the Export. That way you can make a Finder based mirror copy of the photos you want, that you can backup elsewhere. It is better to keep the hierarchy in the Finder, which can then be stored in a Finder Archive that you make control clicking the folder that has the archive name.

Winzip can then open the files on a PC.

Mind you, before you go gungho and move to a PC, you realize anything you can do on a PC you can do on a Mac. Not everything you can do on a Mac can you do on a PC. I'm not trying to convince you to stay on a Mac, buy you should know that native PC software support has existed since 2006 at 100%:

http://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2741

* Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Question: what am I supposed to do with a lifetime of photographs locked into Library files of PHOTOS?

They are not locked in the Photos library. Photos is a database driven DAM (digital asset management) system. This user tip for iPhoto is also applicable to Photos: How to Access Files in iPhoto. You can get your original files out of the library any time you'd like by following rkaufman87's directions.

If you select all of the photos in the library and export the originals

you can opt to have them saved in folders corresponding to the Moments in the library, i.e. each moment is for a give date the photos were taken.

Or you can just export them all into one folder - your choice.

Oh, thank you for the Subfolder Format tip (Moment Name). In the past, when I exported a bunch of photos out of the Photos app on my Mac the file date becomes the date of export which makes it impossible to organize the photos in another app. So this, at least, is a workaround for keeping them organized by date created.

I sure wish Apple would allow us to export them with the creation file date, though. Sigh. 😉

I have 30,000 pics. How do you select them all at one time. Everyone makes this export sound so easy, but it is NOT!