PS Elements to iPhoto migration

December 17, 2010 8:54 AM

How can I migrate my wife's digital pictures from Photoshop Elements 5 on WinXP to iPhoto 8 and preserve the albums?

There aren't many pictures with tags, which the "Write tags to file" command would address. Instead, saving the albums (I think they're called) is most important, as she has sorted out her pictures into many small groups.

I see this Apple Support discussion, but it doesn't affirmatively mention the albums. Would importing the (Windows) folders of pictures one-at-a-time create new iPhoto Albums/Events?

Thanks for any advice, or any clarification: I don't have much experience with PSE, other than rebuilding its catalog periodically for her, and running full exports to an external drive for backups.

posted by wenestvedt to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: i don't have experience with elements, but i know when you drag a folder/directory of pictures in the finder to iphoto it will automatically create an event with the same name as the folder. if you want to make them actual albums though you'll have to drag the event to the sidebar of iphoto.
posted by sammich at 11:23 AM on December 17, 2010

Response by poster: An update: there was a different folder on the PC for each set of pictures. In accordance with prophecy (above) I copied those to an external drive, then moved the drive to the iMac.

In iPhoto, I dragged each folder one at a time into the "Albums" pane, and the pictures were added to iPhoto -- both as a corresponding Album and sorted into Events (based on the pictures' dates). The filenames were preserved, and many tags -- like the description/caption -- were also preserved.

Now, I only have 830-odd folders to do this way...
posted by wenestvedt at 12:02 PM on March 30, 2011