Q: Merge iPhoto and Photos removing Duplicates
I work as the head of IT for my company, and my boss much prefers iPhoto to Photos. He has an iPhotos file that is ~220GB and a Photos file that is ~250GB. There are probably duplicates mixed in with them, so what he wants to be able to do is have them merged, duplicates removed, and everything setup so that iPhoto is the one he uses, not Photos.
From what I've read, Apple has made this impossible. Is that true or is there a way to make this happen?
A little research I've done, please correct me if I'm wrong. When Photos was run, it read the iPhoto library and made a symlink to it, also changing the extension of the file to a Photos library extension. Anything added to Photos was added to its own library, thus Photos was essentially reading the symlinked files and its own library. When iPhoto was run again, it saw that the extension was changed and changed it back. After this, Photos no longer reads from the iPhoto library file and only reads from its own, while iPhoto only reads from its own file and not from Photos. Any changes made in one of the programs would not be reflected in the other. Am I correct in this understanding? If this is the case, would there even be duplicate photos or are all 500GB of his photos unique?
Thanks for any help you're able to provide.
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4), Involves iPhoto and Photos
Posted on Apr 1, 2016 8:18 AM