Gathering 500gb+ of photo images into one library!!
I am finally going through the process of consolidating my various image libraries.
A word of explanation, I take a heap of photos on a regular basis, often 100 a day, and have digital photos going back to 2003. As I’ve neared the capacity of my laptop storage I’ve archived many of the images and started a new library, like about four times.
Each time there have been about 20k or 60k images and a few short movies, the combined total of which now appears to be over 500 GB. Merging and transferring the first two libraries has been easy enough, the issue is filling in some gaps. I want to transfer all the meta-data as well.
That sounds easy, sure, but where are the gaps?
Vigilance is required.
There’s been some technical issues, the early images stored in iPhoto are incompatible with later versions of the program, rebuilding of libraries was required. Each operation takes hours in the background while I get on with something else. Copying 200 GB to an new hard drive, try around seven hours. Then iPhoto was replaced by the incompatible Photos.
There is also the issue of what program I want to view the images in. The most useful one, still, is Aperture but Apple has discontinued development, shortly after I finally paid my $100.
The new program, Photos, does most of what is required, but is not able to export as a particular size which is useful for me, I have to do that in Preview, and it doesn’t have some of the finer controls for tweaking an image, particularly showing under/over exposed areas.
Once you convert the images from Aperture to Photos there is no going back.
I’m keen on the Aperture solution for the moment.
So many memories to revisit, a few too many selfies, but I always seem to look so happy.