Help with getting old photo library to High Sierra after a clean install
Hi all,
In my Pictures folder, there are 3 libraries and I don't know what I need to do about these libraries when I do a clean install of High Sierra:
1) Photos library has 1.36GB in the “Masters folder” and 38.56GB in the “Previews” folder
2) iphoto library has 60.76GB in Masters and 189.3GB in Previews
3) Aperture library has zero KB in both Masters and Previews folders.
Background - Currently I have Aperture on El Capitan and I would like to do a clean install of High Sierra. I have a 1T fusion drive and it has got 300GB free space left. I found out that 368GB of the drive was photos, even though for the past 5 years I have imported all my original photos and videos on external hard drives and have only used referenced files in Aperture. Before I started using Aperture, I used to import photos into iphoto and did some editing and photo projects in there (but still keeping all original on external hard drives).
Goals:
1) I want to reduce the size of my photo library on High Sierra
2) when I open Aperture again on High Sierra, I would like to be able to see all my photo projects in there, i.e., the referenced files neatly organized into projects as it was before, and that these files will be able to locate the referenced masters on my external drives when I click on them.
Questions
1) I have never done a clean install before and only ever restored from Time Machine backup. So what steps do I need to do to backup my photo libraries and after that, how do I insert it back into the new OS, and achieve my goal of having a smaller photo library that doesn’t take up one third of my hard drive? If it is of any help, since I have all my photos on external hard drives, I don’t worry too much about losing the older photos from the photo library. My main objective is not to lose the organization I have in Aperture since 2012 so I can still easily access photo projects by date and event and preview the photos that have been marked for upcoming projects.
2) I also colour code photos for different albums and projects and if I save the color-coded photos as a new project, would they get migrated to the Aperture on High Sierra too?
Any advice would be much appreciated!
Ada
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)