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Even worse, you’ll lose even more metadata, including albums, faces, and print projects. However, as with PowerPhotos, you have to choose between original and edited photos, and you’ll need a lot of extra disk space. It could also be useful if you want to copy a subset of photos between libraries, rather than merging all photos. The main thing it has going for it is that it’s free, and it will be faster than the iCloud Photos approach. You export all the photos from one library and then import them into another. This final option is conceptually simple. Most important, though, is the choice of whether to merge your original photos or the edited versions. PowerPhotos can merge album contents, create an album from each source library, and create a backup before merging. PowerPhotos can import just one of several copies of duplicate photos, or you can bring in all the duplicates if that’s important. This is the library you want to receive all the photos. You aren’t limited to merging just two libraries you can pick multiple sources. In the window that appears, you have four tasks: PowerPhotos provides an actual interface for merging too-choose Library > Merge Libraries to start. Plus, it can’t merge facial recognition data, smart albums, or print projects. Unfortunately, unlike the iCloud Photos approach, which brings in both originals and any edits to those photos, PowerPhotos can import only your original photos or the versions that you’ve edited, not both. It helps you to create and manage multiple libraries, copy photos between libraries, find duplicates, and-most important for this topic-merge libraries.īecause PowerPhotos is working entirely on your Mac’s drive, it’s fast and it doesn’t require huge amounts of extra disk space.
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The $30 PowerPhotos from Fat Cat Software provides a variety of extra capabilities when working with Photos. Needless to say, make sure you have good backups first! Merge with PowerPhotos When you’re done, the last Photos library becomes the one you’ll keep, and you can delete the others. Once the photos have all uploaded, go back to Step 1 with your next Photos library. A Pause link will appear there during uploading-click it if you need to keep Photos from overwhelming your Internet connection. Scroll to the bottom of the Photos view to see the progress. (If it’s dimmed out, that library is already set as the System Photo Library.)

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Plus, it will probably download the entire cloud-based collection of photos to each library whose photos you want to merge, so you may need a lot of local disk space too. If you haven’t already started using it, it could take a week or more to upload many thousands of photos.

More problematic is that the iCloud Photos way of merging will be very slow. iCloud Photos is a good service, so it’s likely worth paying for anyway. Almost everyone will have to pay for additional storage space ($0.99 per month for 50 GB, $2.99 for 200 GB, or $9.99 for 2 TB) for at least the month in which you’re doing the merge.
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On the downside, using iCloud Photos almost certainly won’t be free unless you have so few photos that the combined library will fit within the free 5 GB of iCloud space Apple gives everyone. It also retains all the metadata surrounding your photos-titles, keywords, albums, facial recognition, projects, and more. The trick is that whenever you designate a library as your System Photo Library, Photos automatically uploads all images that aren’t already present, adding them to the photos already in iCloud Photos. Merge through iCloud PhotosĪpple’s iCloud Photos service offers the best solution for merging libraries. You have three options: merging through iCloud Photos, using the PowerPhotos utility, and merging by exporting and importing. Unfortunately, the process is slow, can require a lot of disk space, and may result in the loss of some metadata.

If you struggle with multiple Photos libraries, never fear-you can merge them. But too much separation is annoying-you have to keep switching between libraries, and it’s easy to import new photos into the wrong one. For instance, a real estate agent might want to keep personal photos separate from house photos taken for work.

That’s good when photos need to be kept completely separate. Photos makes it easy to create and switch between libraries.
