How To Merge Two Photo Libraries On Mac

06.04.2020
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To combine Photos libraries, open the source library and export the photos and videos that you want to keep. Then open the destination library (the one that you want to use as your main library) and import the photos and videos.

  1. Merge Two Photo Libraries On Mac
  2. Restore Photos Library

Feb 26, 2018  The third group is Mac users who have and use Photos. The fourth group needs multiple photo libraries. Here are two ways you can get and manage multiple Photos photo libraries on your Mac. First, if there is a scourge that existed on my Photos and iPhoto library for years, and exists on the new Photos, too, it’s photo duplicates. MacMost forum question: How Do I Merge Photo Libraries? Over time I seem to have generated a few photo libraries, with much duplication, I think. Is there a simple way of merging them so that there is only one library that both iPhoto and Apple Photos can use?.

Choose a photo library

Here's how to open one of the multiple photo libraries that you might have on your Mac or on a connected external drive:

  1. Press and hold the Option key as you open the Photos app.
  2. Select the library that you want to open, then click Choose Library.

Photos uses this library until you open a different one using the same steps.

Export photos and videos from the source library

Open the source library, then decide whether you want to export your files as unmodified originals or edited versions:

Edited versions retain their edits when you import them. The advantage is that you don't have to recreate any edits; however, these files become the destination library's originals. This means that you can't revert to their earliest pre-import version.

Unmodified originals don't show any edits that you made when they were in the source library. This gives you flexibility for later editing, but recreating your edits might take substantial work.

How to export edited versions

  1. In the Photos app, select the photos and videos that you want to export. To select multiple items, press and hold the Command key while you click. To select a group of items in order, click the first one, then press and hold the Shift key while you click the last one. This selects all of the items between the two that you clicked.
  2. Choose File > Export > Export [number].
  3. An export dialog appears.
    • In the Photos section, set Photo Kind to JPEG, TIFF, or PNG. JPEG recompresses your photos, which may result in smaller file sizes. TIFF and PNG files are higher fidelity and may result in larger file sizes.
    • In the Videos section, choose a Movie Quality setting. This section appears only if your selected items include videos.
    • In the Info section, select the checkboxes if you want to preserve metadata and location data in the exported files.
    • In the File Naming section, set File Name to Use File Name and set Subfolder Format to either Moment Name or None. Moment Name creates a subfolder for each Moment that's represented in your selected items. This is useful if you'd like to create an Album in the destination library for each Moment. The None option exports all of the files directly into the destination folder.
  4. Click Export. A Finder dialog appears.
  5. Navigate to the location where you want to save the files, such as the Desktop or an external drive. Click New Folder if you create a new folder for your exported items.
  6. Click Export.

How to export unmodified originals

  1. In the Photos app, then select the photos and videos that you want to export. To select multiple items, press and hold the Command key while you click. To select a group of items in order, click the first one, then press and hold the Shift key while you click the last one. This selects all of the items between the two that you clicked.
  2. Choose File > Export > Export Unmodified Original.
  3. An export dialog appears.
    • If your photos include IPTC metadata (such as titles or keywords) that you want to keep, select the Export IPTC as XMP checkbox.
    • Leave the File Name setting on Use File Name.
    • Next to Subfolder Format, choose Moment Name or None. Moment Name creates a subfolder for each Moment that's represented in your selected items. This is useful if you'd like to create an Album in the destination library for each Moment. The None option exports all of the files directly into the destination folder.
  4. Click Export. A Finder dialog appears.
  5. Navigate to the location where you want to save the files, such as the Desktop or an external drive. Click New Folder if you create a new folder for your exported items.
  6. Click Export Originals.

How to import photos and videos into the destination library

Open the destination library, then drag the folder that contains your exported items into the main area that shows your other photos and videos. When a green plus sign appears on your pointer, you can release the folder.

The photos in the folder are sorted into Moments based on their creation dates and locations. The videos are sorted based on the date you exported them from the source library.

If you created subfolders when you exported the items and you want to create an Album for each subfolder, follow these steps:

  1. In the Finder, open a subfolder.
  2. Select all of the photos and videos within the subfolder.
  3. Drag the items onto My Albums in the Photos sidebar.
  4. Name the Album in the highlighted text box that appears in the sidebar.
  5. Repeat for each subfolder.

Save space by deleting the source library

If you're sure that you've exported all of the photos and videos that you want to keep from the source library, you can delete it to save disk space on your Mac.

First, open the Finder and find the source library that you want to delete. By default, photo libraries are stored in your Pictures folder. If you can't find the library, follow the steps to choose a library; the path to the selected library's location appears in the Choose Library window.

Next, move the source library to the Trash. Then choose Finder > Empty Trash to permanently delete the files.

Learn more

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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

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.

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

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Photos will start syncing your library with iCloud, uploading all of the full size photos from your Photos library.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. If you have more than two libraries, repeat the same steps for each library you want to merge.
  8. 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:

Merge Two Photo Libraries On Mac

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. There are a few limitations to what will sync through iCloud, which you can read about here

Restore Photos Library

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.

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