Apple’s newest Photos and the old iPhoto are probably the only photo management applications left that take your photos captive. Apple, in their quest for simplicity has never trusted you, the user, to learn how to do things the right wayso it makes decisions for you. Granted, some of these decisions are good, but if you want to make any changes, you simply can’t. Therefore, if you want to move from Photos to any other photo manager, Apple makes it very difficult, but not impossible. Read on to find out how to move away from Photos on your Mac. Photos takes your digital photos captivestill Once you start using Photo (and everyone who has a new Mac uses Photos to some degree or another), Photos will store your photos in the locked Photos Library folder just like the old iPhoto software on the Mac. Therefore, it is difficult to move away from Photos if you decide to change photo management software.
Read more about the old iPhoto Mac software:. As a consequence, you cannot simply move your Photos Library sub-folders and afterwards delete them. The reason is that Photos locks the Photos library and this means you cannot see or change what is inside the Photos library file. What do you do then if you want to move away from Photos? How do you get your pictures out of Photos so you can rename the folders so that they make sense and help you?
First however, you must prepare by answering three important questions:. Do you have enough room on your computer? Make sure you have enough room on your hard drive before doing this operation because this procedure will first create another copy of ALL your pictures. If you don’t have enough space, just export a few albums from Photos and then delete them from Photosand repeat. To find out how large your Photos library is just Click on Finder then click on Pictures and notice the size of the Photos Library file. Then check your hard drive remaining space as well to make sure it will fit. If you find you don’t have room, move some files to a.
Do you want to still keep your pictures in Photos after the export? You need to decide if you want to keep your events still in Photos in addition to exporting them. However, if you are nervous about deleting your photos from Photos, you can keep them in both places until you decide. You just need to know that you will be creating two copies of your pictures and it becomes more difficult to keep track of which photos you exported.
What program will you be using instead of Photos? Whether it is, or, make sure you have it installed and ready to use.
The good thing about organizing your pictures outside of Photos is that you can switch your programs later without losing any of your work. Step 1: Create one export folder for all your photos Start your move from Photos with a very simple step. Having one folder with all your exported photos will help you slowly work through them and organize them as you have time. This is the target folder for all your pictures as you move them outside of Photos photo manager. Create one export folder called FROM-PHOTOS. Step 2: Select all your pictures in Photos Continue your move from Photos by selecting all your pictures. The new Photos photo manager allows you to select all your pictures in one operation which is great.
This way, selecting all your pictures can be done quickly. Select all your pictures in Photos Step 3: Export all your pictures from Photos Now, we need to export all your pictures in order to complete your move from Photos. Once you selected all your pictures, select the Export menu option.
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Exporting pictures from Photos You have two options available. Export Photos – this option will export your photos with all the edits and metadata you have created in Photos. If you want to keep all the changes you have made on Photos, then choose this option. You need to understand though that if you have cropped an image in Photos and export it with this option, it is only the cropped image that will be exported and not the original picture. In addition, this option will apply compression to your original images.
This means that your exported images will have a decreased resolution. Options for exporting pictures with all your Photos edits Export Unmodified Original – this option will export your original pictures without any edits you have done in Photos. You definitely want to use this option if you have RAW files and you need your original files.
This is the only option available if you want to keep the original resolution of your pictures. Options for exporting original pictures from Photos You have three options available for exporting original files: Export IPTC as XMP – this option allows you to export the metadata to an additional side car file. This means you get an extra file containing XMP metadata. If you don’t know what this means you probably need to leave it unchecked. However, if you have RAW images and you added metadata in Photos, then you need to check this checkbox. File name – this option will maintain the actual picture file names that your camera produced.
I recommend using the “Use File Name” option. Subfolder format – this option determines the names of the folders resulting from the export operation. I recommend using the “Moment Name” option. Now that you have exported all your pictures from Photos, your export folder (05-FROM-PHOTOS) should look like the picture below. Results of exporting pictures from Photos Notice that my export folder 05-FROM-PHOTOS contains all my pictures from Photos organized in folders with the date when the pictures were taken as the folder names.
This is the result you want. These names are still not the final name you need but it’s a good first step. Step 4: Delete your exported event folders from Photos At this point you have created another copy of all your photos. In order to cleanup after your move from Photos, you need to delete the old pictures inside the Photos library. Photos holds one copy in its Photos Library and in addition you have just created another copy by exporting your event to the FROM-IPHOTO folder. So the next step is easy! Important note: If you are nervous about deleting all your photos from Photos, then you can do this step after you have organized everything in your export folder ( 05-FROM-PHOTOS) outside of Photos.
At this point you have exported all your pictures (essentially you have created another copy of your pictures outside of Photos) Photos to another folder. You should still have them all selected in Photos and you can simply Command + Click (or both mouse buttons together) and bring up the context menu and choose the Delete option. Delete your exported photos This operation should successfully remove all your pictures from the Library folder that Photo uses as the main place for putting all your pictures.
You can check in Finder the size of the Photos Libraryit should be very very small now having no pictures in it. Remember that this operation does NOT remove the Photos application from your Mac. It only moves your pictures from Photos to an external folder that you can organize as you want. Step 5: Make Photos play “nice” with your photos In order to complete your move from Photos, you need to “tell” Photos to behave. While Photos does take your digital photos captive by default, it does provide some simple settings that make it play nicely with other software you might want to use for managing your photos. When your camera is plugged into your Mac, Photos opens by default but you can simply uncheck the checkbox for your camera to stop Photos from coming up automatically.
You can always bring up Photos up manually so this doesn’t really break anythingit just stops Photos from coming up every time you connect a camera to your Mac. Disable automatic import into Photos Step 5: Use your new photo manager to transfer new pictures Now, that you have completed your move from Photos, start using your new photo manager instead of Photos. Whatever software you decide to use instead of Photos (like ACDSee, Lightroom or Picasa), make sure that from now on, you only use that software for importing new photosinstead of Photos. Once you have exported your organized events from Photos make sure you setup another folder to help you with transferring new photos from your cameras.
In other words, once you get your photos out of Photos, stop using Photos to import new photos. Otherwise, you will have to repeat this procedure. Setup that software so that it will transfer your new digital photos from your camera to the new folder you have createdthe one you used for exporting ( Pictures/TRANSFER).
Whether you use Picasa, Lightroom, set it up so all new photos will use the new TRANSFER folder as the destination for photo transfer. At the end of the entire procedure your folder structure would look something like this: Pictures TRANSFER FROM-IPHOTO.lots of sub-folders from iPhoto. Once your pictures have been exported, examine the folder names you have in your new folder structure. If you have not used Photos to cleanup and organize your events prior to exporting them, you must start organizing these events that you have exported. Read more about. Also you might find useful my article about,.
Important note about connecting Android phones to Picasa on the Mac: it doesn’t work! Picasa on the Mac does not see Android phones at all. However, you can simply use Image Capture on the Mac to transfer your photos from your Android phone to your TRANSFER folder. Then you can simply organize them there. You can find detailed videos about transferring photos my Should you move away from Photos? Photos is the Apple’s new photo manager which replaces the old iPhotos. While it is a powerful photo management tool, Photos maintains the same old approach from iPhotos.
Apple has for the sake of simplifying your digital life, but with these decisions they have essentially taken your digital photos captive. The good thing is that you can export your pictures out of Photos and use something elseanything else that will allow you to manage your photo folders. Should you move from Photos? The answer is yes if you want to have the freedom to name and organize your photo folders the way you want and be able to control your media library. If on the other hand you are not comfortable with manipulating file folders and files, then maybe you should not move from Photos and stick with the decisions that Apple makes for you. Essentials for organizing your digital photos Over the years I have come to rely on only a few products for managing and backing up my large media collection. These are my essential products and services I have been using for many years to keep things organized and safe.
Even though these are affiliate links, I wholeheartedly recommend them. I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC via the. Lightroom has excellent photo editing capabilities. Yes, Lightroom has a steeper learning curve as you have to learn to keep your catalogs in sync with your hard drive. However, Adobe Lightroom makes most sense especially when you do lots of image editing. If you don't like the subscription, you can get also download the last standalone Adobe Lightroom 6 for or (while it is still available). However, the product is no longer maintained by Adobe.
Excellent Lightroom and Picasa alternative. If you're looking for a cheaper and simpler photo manager then or is my preferred solution for organizing your media on your computer. It has a very fast browser, beautiful image editing capabilities and you don't work with catalogs at all. In addition, make sure you have an for backing everything up. It is absolutely essential for backing up your media regularly.
If you're looking for a reliable unlimited cloud backup service, I recommend. I have used Backblaze for my online backup for more than 3 years now. All my files are safe and secure and I have never had any problems with them. Dellnot sure what is going on but try these stepsmaybe it will work: 1) On Step 2 make sure all the photos seem to be selected after you choose “Select All”. My suspicion is that somehow you only have a small subset selected.
Just scroll through the photos fast, all the way to the end and make sure they are all selected. If not, try selecting them all again and try it again.
2) If #1 above failstry selecting only one year worth of photos and export them to a local folder instead of your external drive. External drives are much slower, so maybe Photos has an issue with that. If this works, simply move this exported folder from your internal drive to your external drive. Thank you for this article. I absolutely hate, loathe, and despise iPhoto/Photos! As you describe, it literally takes all of your photos hostage, in a terrible application which runs very sluggishly, slowly, with an absolutely terrible photo organization method. I got my master photos out of iPhoto–only to discover a MASSIVE amount of thousands of photo folders: they are organized by year, then month, and finally then abstract number codes are assigned by iPhoto to specific series of photos which were imported into iPhoto from your camera so, you have no idea what is in the folder!
So, even after you export your master photos from iPhoto, you are then left with a gigantic mass of your master photos buried in sub folders with meaningless number code titles as assigned by iPhoto! So now I am doing the incredibly tedious task of going through every single one of these numbered files with the original photos to then put them into dated folders with a title that helps me know what is in the file. This is a massive, massive job! I really hate the Apple engineers who created iPhoto/Photos because they did not create a viable ergonomic way to export the master photos out of iPhoto with at least a more intuitive user friendly way. IPhoto/Photos is easily the WORST photo viewing/managing application I have ever used. That said, I’m really looking forward to when I have all my original photos back, and in folders where I can easily navigate and view them–i.e. The antithesis of Apple iPhoto/Photos!
Hello, I’m not sure how old this article is, but its very useful. I wondered if this export method will work for a very very large photos album (70gb). You suggest export all, so I gather this will take a while to process if i tried to do all at once? Also is there a way to export in this way to an external hard drive or a cloud storage space (not apple), do you know? Any advice would be appreciated.
I need to get these pics backed up and stored elsewhere than this mac itself, as there is no longer any hard drive space to do anything, and a whole list of back ups and upgrades need to be completed! Kind regards Renee. Reneegreat questions!
I originally wrote this article a couple of years ago but I have updated regularly to keep up with the changes in Photos. As to your questionsyes this process will work with large catalogs like yours and you should be able to export to. Later you can upload to a.
But first focus on getting your photos on an external hard drive. You can actually start with all the photos from one year and see how it goes. Create a smart album for that year, select it and then select all photos for that year.then export to your external drive. Check your results and repeat. I tested an iPhoto Original export to a USB external hard drive with 4 Pictures. It was successful and i noticed that it was still in iPhoto with the same specs. I then proceeded to export a large number of Originals to the same Hard drive.
That hard drive got shorted unfortunately and I wanted to repeat. Most of the pictures are still exportable but lots aren’t. I says the original is no longer to be found. Any chance to create something exportable from what I am seeing in iPhoto? What am i seeing on iPhoto if its not the original? To recover my data from the shorted hard drive i got a 4 figure estimate so i hope there can be another solution. Matthew ps For the record I am on a mid 2007 iMac with El Capitan.
Maybe someone mentioned this in a comment above, but you left out a very important reason for everyone to export the unmodified original photo, regardless of whether they made edits to or modified the metadata of an image. That being that, when exporting without selecting the unmodified original version option, photos will export a file that is vastly smaller than the original.
A 30mb photo will be exported with a size below 10mb. When viewing the images at first glance one may not realize how their photo has been altered, but when inspected closer the loss of quality due to compression is clear. Just something I feel like is crucial and should be mentioned when you explain why one should or perhaps should not check the ‘export unmodified original’ box.
Thanks Vlad, i’ll get this done ASAP. The thing with Photos that i’ve found frustrating is that when I want to upload photos to a site to make a photo book i can only export these to desktop and then upload from there in small batches as i can’t find the location information of the photos in ‘Photos’, unlike when i had a PC and could just upload the contents of an entire folder containing an unlimited number of files.
Any tips on a decent photo manager for a Mac that isn’t ‘Photos’ that will allow me to store everything in one place (external or internal drive) and just click one upload button on a site that will just ask for the path to the files. (I know i can make Photobooks on ‘Photos’ but at roughly 400% of the price compared to the site i use, I’d prefer not too if i can get around it. Hi Vlad, I have tried the steps outlined above to finally create my own library structure and become tool independent using embedded tags. I do, however, have one serious doubt when I look at the steps outlined above: Is there a way to both – a) keep the photo edits and tags etc.
B) have the exact same picture quality as before for not edited photos? I have noticed that if I use the “Export Photos” option with JPEG quality “High” as in your screenshot, I will get JPEG files that are considerably smaller than my original files – even if I did not edit them in Photos. – this seems bad, since Photos is messing with the files even without me asking for any “enhancements” – do you know what happens here? If I chose JPEG quality “Maximum”, my photos suddenly get much larger even as the originals (sometimes x2), as if Photos was trying to “add” information to the image even though the pixel count stays the same – also not good, right? But if I use the “Export Unmodified Original” option, I lose all my retouching and cropping actions, as well as all already embedded tags on all images, something I want to keep since I have spent quite some time on it already Is there a middle ground, where I get the originals from the images I did not touch including the tags and the optimal quality in retouched images if I worked on them in Photos? Thanks and BR. Get a personal plan specific for your computer setup in addition to all my books and videos.
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