Mar 03, 2019 To merge in iCloud enable the smaller of the two libraries as your iCloud Photo Library.Wait for all photos to upload; that can take a very long time, a week ore more, depending on the size of the library. Photos will merge the the library into the library that is already in iCloud.Now enable the larger library as your iCloud Photo Library.
We take a lot of photos with our iPhones and even DSLRs and other cameras. Photos are great for capturing memories with others, or when you just want to get a snapshot of something beautiful. Photos on Mac can help you keep all of your photos in one place, and even help you organize them.
How to add pictures and videos to albums
- My favorite method to merge two different Photos libraries is as follows: 1. Pick the 'main' library you want to drop the content into. You'll lose information such as your albums and other data besides the photos from the other library.
- Apr 22, 2015 How to use multiple photo libraries with Photos for Mac. Photos for Mac lets you work with multiple libraries. Learn how to choose a default library, open another library, and merge multiple.
- PowerPhotos works with the built-in Photos app on your Mac, providing an array of tools to help you get your photo collection in order. Create and manage multiple libraries Instead of being limited to putting all your photos in a single library, PowerPhotos can work with multiple Photos libraries, giving you many more options for how to.
If you have a lot of photos and videos, one of the simplest and easiest ways to start organizing everything is to make use of albums, especially when you give them good names. And if you use iCloud Photo Library, all of your albums in Photos for Mac get synced to your iOS devices too.
- Launch Photos on your Mac.
- Click on Photos in the sidebar, under the Library section.
- Pick out the photos you want to add to an album, either new or existing.
- Hold down the command key on your Mac and click to select multiple photos.
- Right-click on your chosen photos and videos.
- Move the cursor to Add to.
- You can choose an existing album, or create new album.
- If making a new album, give it a good, easy-to-remember name.
Optionally, you can make a new album at any time by clicking the + button that appears in the sidebar next to My Albums. Drag-and-drop the albums in whatever order you want to rearrange them in the sidebar.
How to organize albums and folders
When you have a lot of albums, it may be better to clean it all up by organizing albums into folders, which are like collections of albums. It's easy to do. Mac library launchagents.
- Launch Photos on your Mac.
- Either right-click on My Albums in the sidebar, or hover above and then click on the + button that appears next to My Albums.
- Click New Folder.
- Give your folder a name.
- Drag the albums that you want into that folder.
How to use Smart Albums
Smart Albums are like regular albums, but smarter, obviously. They're great for helping you quickly organize images without the need of manually adding each one to an album because it's all automated.
- Launch Photos on your Mac.
- Right-click on My Albums or click the + button that appears next to My Albums.
- Select New Smart Album.
- Give your Smart Album a name.
- Choose the parameters for your Smart Album.
- Click OK to confirm.
Smart Albums have a large number of different parameters, such as photos, faces, aperture, ISO, Live Photo, RAW, Portrait, and more. With all of these options, you can create many different Smart Albums to suit whatever it is you need.
If you're not satisfied with the Smart Album, you can always tweak the settings by clicking on the gear icon that's next to the Smart Album's title, then re-select the parameters you want to use.
Unfortunately, Smart Albums do not sync to your other devices through iCloud Photo Library, as they're only available on your Mac.
How to navigate Photos for Mac faster with the sidebar
The Sidebar in Photos is a great way to quickly jump between various areas in Photos quickly and easily. Plus, it helps you find albums that may otherwise be hidden, so this was a design choice made by Apple.
However, if you are running macOS Sierra and older, you can actually hide or unhide the sidebar as you wish.
- Launch Photos on your Mac.
- Click on View in the menu bar.
- Select Show Sidebar in the menu.
- The sidebar will appear on the left side of the screen.
- Follow the steps above to hide it (make sure Show Sidebar is unchecked).
How to navigate moments, collections, and year views in macOS Mojave and earlier
One of the coolest things about Photos is that it intelligently groups all of your photos and videos into moments, collections, and years.
This means that your photos appear in a timeline and are grouped by things like location, or even event. It's a great way to take a look back at your memories and relive those specific moments in time.
The Moments, Collections, and Year views are only available in macOS Mojave and older.
- Launch Photos on your Mac.
- Make sure that you're in the Photos view from the sidebar.
- Click on Photos, Moments, Collections, or Years buttons at the top of the window.
- Click on a section of a Year to move to that Collection, or a section of a Collection to drill down into that Moment, or an item in a Moment to view that image or video in closer detail.
- You can also use your keyboard's arrow keys to move between photos and videos in a Moment.
- A single click on an item selects it, while a double click takes you to view it.
In the Year and Collections views, thumbnails can be small. You can click-and-hold and then drag the cursor in any direction over the thumbnails to get a larger preview. Letting go will take you directly to the image that the cursor was last on.
How to navigate through Years, Months, and Days in macOS Catalina
To replace the previous Moments/Collections/Years view, Catalina changed it to Years, Months, and Days for simplicity.
- Launch Photos on your Mac.
- Make sure you're in the Photos section in the sidebar.Source: iMore
- Click the Years, Months, or Days buttons at the top of the window. The default view is All Photos.
- Clicking on Years lets you see each year as a block. Double-clicking the year takes you into Months.
- When you double-click on a Month, you'll drill down into the Days view. Ld_library_path environment variable mac.
How to create a new library with Photos for Mac
You can create a new library for your photos at any time with Photos for Mac. To do so, make sure that you quit Photos and reopen it with the following method to get the Library options.
- Hold down the Option key on your keyboard.
- Double-click on Photos on your Mac.
- Click on the Create New button in the Choose Library window.
- Name your Library.
- Click OK.
You've now created a brand new Photos Library. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to migrate over photos and video, so you will need to export the content you want, and then import it back into the new library.
How to switch between Libraries in Photos for Mac
When you create a new library, you may still want to go back to a previous library for something. Fortunately, it's easy to switch between multiple libraries.
- Make sure that Photos is not open (quit if it is).
- Hold down the Option key on your keyboard.
- Double-click on Photos.
- Click on the name of the library you want to open.
Voilá! Just make sure to repeat this process each time you want to switch to a different Photo library.
How to move your Photos library to an external hard drive
If you're low on storage space on your Mac, you can just move your Photos Library to an external hard drive. Keep in mind though, that you will need to have this external drive plugged in to access your Photos Library, even if you have iCloud Photo Library enabled. And you aren't able to create a second Photos Library that has iCloud Photo Library enabled on your Mac, so be wary.
- Launch a Finder window on your Mac.
- Click on the Mac hard drive (Macintosh HD) in the sidebar.
- Double-click on the Users folder.
- Double-click on your username.
- Double-click on your Pictures folder.
- Click on the Photos Library file and then drag it to your external hard drive in the sidebar.
This process may take a while, depending on how big your Photos library is.
A note on reference libraries
The Photos app technically supports the management of images that aren't locally stored within its library — that is, you can keep a set of images in a folder called 'October Trip' and manage them within Photos without having to make a separate copy of them. You can do this by navigating to Photos > Preferences from the menu bar, selecting the General tab, and unchecking the 'Copy items to the Photos library' box under Importing.
That said, reference libraries won't play nicely with iCloud Photo Library users; you may run into problems when syncing, or not be able to sync at all. So if you plan on using a reference library, you'll have to opt out of iCloud Photo Library.
I also didn't have any luck getting referenced files to sync properly with Photos — I'd delete a photo, but the reference file would stay in its original location, even after deleting it from the 'Recently Deleted' folder. Not sure if that's a bug or just not how Photos wants us managing referenced photos, but worth noting.
Questions?
![Photo Photo](https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/Help/print/merging libraries.merge_setup.png)
Sound off in the comments below!
October 2019: Updated for macOS Catalina.
Photos for Mac
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For all your USB-C needsThe HybridDrive is a USB-C dock with an SSD built in
You need more ports, right? And you probably need more storage, right? What you really need is the HybridDrive.
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Merging Photos libraries
Update (11/3/2015): PowerPhotos 1.1 now supports library merging!
Unlike iPhoto Library Manager, PowerPhotos does not yet have the capability to merge libraries together. This is something I’d like to add to PowerPhotos, though I can’t make any concrete promises, since doing so partially depends on whether Photos itself adds a few necessary enhancements. In the meantime, since I get asked about this a lot, I thought I’d put up a quick summary of the existing methods to get your content all together into a single Photos library.
Merge your iPhoto libraries beforehand
How To Merge Multiple Photo Libraries On Mac
At this point, most people looking to merge libraries together have existing iPhoto or Aperture libraries that they’re either planning to migrate to Photos, or have already done so. Since merging options with Photos itself are very limited, if you do want to merge your libraries, it will be much easier to first merge everything together as iPhoto libraries, then take the resulting merged iPhoto library and migrate *that* to Photos afterward.
Why Do I Have Multiple Photos Libraries
If you haven’t migrated any of your existing libraries yet, then simply use iPhoto Library Manager to merge the libraries together first, then open the merged library in Photos to let it perform the migration (Aperture can also be used to merge iPhoto libraries, though it doesn’t perform duplicate detection like iPLM does). If you have already migrated some/all of your iPhoto libraries though, you may still be able to follow this route. Photos leaves the original iPhoto library intact after performing the migration, so as long as you haven’t deleted the iPhoto library yourself, you should be able to go back and perform the merge, then migrate the merged library to Photos.
To migrate an iPhoto library a second time, the easiest way is to use the File > Migrate iPhoto Libraries command in PowerPhotos. Just check the box next to the iPhoto library and click Migrate, and PowerPhotos will take care of the details. To do it without PowerPhotos, you’ll need to open the library in iPhoto first, and it should give you a brief messing saying that the library has been migrated to Photos already. Click the “Open in iPhoto” button, then close the library back up. Then, take the iPhoto library and drop it on the Photos icon in the dock, and it will perform the migration a second time.
If you have imported any newer photos into Photos since you performed your first migration, those photos will not have been imported into iPhoto, and thus will be missing from the merged library. If this is the case, you’ll just need to either export those photos from the first Photos library that you migrated, then import them into the second library, or just reimport/redownload them from your iPhone or wherever they may have come from.
Use iCloud to merge your content
The other technique that can be used here is to merge everything together by uploading it into your iCloud Photo Library. This will work with any Photos library, whether it was migrated from iPhoto originally or not, and can be used to merge libraries on different Macs (though they must be using the same iCloud account). The basic workflow for this is:
- First, you’ll want to choose which one of your libraries you want to ultimately be the merged library, that will ultimately hold all the content.
- Open that library in Photos, open the preferences window, and click the “Use as System Photo Library” button. Then, in the iCloud section of the preferences, enable iCloud Photo Library. Make sure that the “Download Original to this Mac” option is enabled.
- Photos will start syncing your library with iCloud, uploading all of the full size photos from your Photos library.
- If you already have other devices with iCloud Photo Library enabled (e.g. your iPhone or iPad), in addition to uploading all the photos in your Photos library, it will also download any photos that have already been synced with those devices.
- Once that library has been fully synced (this may take quite some time if the library is large, even multiple days), open a different library in Photos, and repeat the same steps. The content from the second library will be added to what’s already in iCloud Photo Library.
- By default, syncing the second library with iCloud will also download all the content from the first library into the second library onto your Mac. However, if you enable the “Optimize Mac Storage” option in the iCloud preferences in Photos, that will only initially download smaller thumbnail versions of each photo, which can speed up this part of the process and use less disk space and bandwidth.
- If you have more than two libraries, repeat the same steps for each library you want to merge.
- Once you’ve processed the rest of the libraries, open the first one up again, enable iCloud Photo Library on it, and let it redownload all the full sized photos that were uploaded from the other libraries.
While this is an effective way to get your libraries merged together, there are a few significant downsides:
- If you have a significant amount of photos that you need to merge together, it’s going to take a lot of time, bandwidth, and disk space to perform all of this uploading and downloading from iCloud. For really large collections, you may be looking at a project spanning multiple days or even weeks.
- iCloud only provides 5 GB of storage for free, so if your collection exceeds that (which is not difficult), you’ll need to purchase one of Apple’s larger storage plans, at least while you’re doing all the syncing. If you’re not interested in using iCloud Photo Library in the long run, it is possible to bump up your storage for a short time, remove the photos from iCloud once you’ve gotten everything downloaded back to your Mac, then move your account back down to the basic storage plan.
- If you have an iOS device also synced with iCloud, it will start to download all the content that you’re uploading, which can sometimes eat up bandwidth and battery life. You may want to enable the “optimize storage” option in the Photos section of the Settings app on your iOS device before starting, or just turn off iCloud Photo Library altogether if you want to prevent that.
- There are a few limitations to what will sync through iCloud, which you can read about here
Stock Photos
Those are the main two techniques that can be used to merge your photos together into a single Photos library. Each of them has its downsides, but hopefully if you want to get all your photos in one place, one of this options will work for you.