Getting out of the Photos Picture
February 8, 2016 11:38 PM Subscribe
I have an 8 year old MacBook Pro, an 8 day old Windows 10 desktop, and 26 thousand photos. Help me improve my life/workflow.
Photography is an important hobby for me. I've let the basic, non-fiddly utility of iPhone+MacBook rule my life for the past two years. Now that I've got a swanky, speedy desktop, I want to take full advantage of it for managing my photo library and projects.
What is my best bet for bringing my 175 gb Photos library into a new Win10 environment while retaining tags, albums, and album orders?
I have dozens of hours invested in organizing photos for a specific project and don't want to lose that work. Sometime the same image is in multiple albums. Sometimes a single image is duplicated and cropped in different ways.
I have access to Adobe Bridge and Lightroom on both computers, but have never used them. I have Flickr, but don't use it regularly. I have a Dropbox with plenty of room, but don't currently use it for mass photo storage.
It is an option to keep doing my in-progress photo projects on the laptop until they're exported, but it is far from my favorite option right now.
Photography is an important hobby for me. I've let the basic, non-fiddly utility of iPhone+MacBook rule my life for the past two years. Now that I've got a swanky, speedy desktop, I want to take full advantage of it for managing my photo library and projects.
What is my best bet for bringing my 175 gb Photos library into a new Win10 environment while retaining tags, albums, and album orders?
I have dozens of hours invested in organizing photos for a specific project and don't want to lose that work. Sometime the same image is in multiple albums. Sometimes a single image is duplicated and cropped in different ways.
I have access to Adobe Bridge and Lightroom on both computers, but have never used them. I have Flickr, but don't use it regularly. I have a Dropbox with plenty of room, but don't currently use it for mass photo storage.
It is an option to keep doing my in-progress photo projects on the laptop until they're exported, but it is far from my favorite option right now.
https://code.google.com/archive/p/phoshare/
Keyword export is a problem because Apple doesn't like your freedom.
posted by srboisvert at 6:16 AM on February 9, 2016
Keyword export is a problem because Apple doesn't like your freedom.
posted by srboisvert at 6:16 AM on February 9, 2016
Response by poster: What program are you using now for sorting/tagging, is it iPhoto?
No, the new native "Photos" app. Because Apple doesn't want solutions to be googlable.
posted by itesser at 8:18 AM on February 9, 2016
No, the new native "Photos" app. Because Apple doesn't want solutions to be googlable.
posted by itesser at 8:18 AM on February 9, 2016
Response by poster: Phoshare stopped development over 3 years ago. I doubt it will be helpful.
posted by itesser at 8:21 AM on February 9, 2016
posted by itesser at 8:21 AM on February 9, 2016
I use Picasa to manage a photo library of a similar size. I have some issues with Picasa, and Google treats it with neglect, but I doubt it's going away anytime soon. And it is extremely fast, even with gigantic libraries, and for most common purposes very easy to use.
As far as I know your other option is Lightroom, which is more popular with serious / professional photographers. I have no experience with it, so can't help you there.
As for transferring the photos with all metadata intact... good luck. Your best hope of success is if as much metadata as possible is embedded in the photos themselves, i.e. as EXIF or IPTC tags. That's where Picasa stores e.g. titles and keywords; photo edits, sort order and album data are stored in invisible .ini files I think. I'd guess Photos app probably does something similar.
So if you can't find any way of automatically preserving albums, you could give special keywords to all photos in an album, and use that to recreate the albums in your new app.
I'd say your chances of preserving the order of photos in the albums are slim. (But I'd almost always keep them organised by date anyway.)
posted by snarfois at 8:45 AM on February 9, 2016
As far as I know your other option is Lightroom, which is more popular with serious / professional photographers. I have no experience with it, so can't help you there.
As for transferring the photos with all metadata intact... good luck. Your best hope of success is if as much metadata as possible is embedded in the photos themselves, i.e. as EXIF or IPTC tags. That's where Picasa stores e.g. titles and keywords; photo edits, sort order and album data are stored in invisible .ini files I think. I'd guess Photos app probably does something similar.
So if you can't find any way of automatically preserving albums, you could give special keywords to all photos in an album, and use that to recreate the albums in your new app.
I'd say your chances of preserving the order of photos in the albums are slim. (But I'd almost always keep them organised by date anyway.)
posted by snarfois at 8:45 AM on February 9, 2016
You know, I think you may be able to keep more metadata than you think. Apple Photos can export the originals/modified images in folders sorted by moment, and can attach metadata (titles/tags/locations, etc) in the standard XMP format. Now all you need is a Windows app that will import and understand XMP.
Here's a tutorial on exporting your photos from Apple Photos. I know nothing about the platform it's expecting you to import into (Mylio) so I don't know if it's any good, but all your metadata will not be lost. I tried a little run through on my Mac here, and it seems to save most of the metadata that I'd find useful.
posted by scruss at 11:04 AM on February 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
Here's a tutorial on exporting your photos from Apple Photos. I know nothing about the platform it's expecting you to import into (Mylio) so I don't know if it's any good, but all your metadata will not be lost. I tried a little run through on my Mac here, and it seems to save most of the metadata that I'd find useful.
posted by scruss at 11:04 AM on February 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: In the end, I used flickr uploader to transfer almost 27,000 photos into the cloud, and didn't bother worrying about metadata.
I'll keep using Photos for this project, then find a new workflow on my new computer for future undertakings.
posted by itesser at 11:13 PM on March 3, 2016
I'll keep using Photos for this project, then find a new workflow on my new computer for future undertakings.
posted by itesser at 11:13 PM on March 3, 2016
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posted by lemonade at 6:16 AM on February 9, 2016