Feedback on getting old photos into my moms icloud?

December 12, 2020 6:04 AM

I would love some feedback on the best way to migrate an old photo library to my mothers icloud photo storage? My mother uses an iphone and an ipad. She uses a shared family storage plan supplied by me and is for her icloud storgage. She does not use or have access to a computer that syncs with her iPhone or iPad.

The photos are currently on a 3.5” HDD within a Time Machine Backup. (At least five years old)

My process was going to be this, unless I am making an obvious mistake or two.

1. Excavate the iPhoto Library from the sparsebundle on her old Time Machine Drive. Not sure if I can find it directly or if I have to use Time Machine to mount the sparsebundle. It is also an older Backup, not sure if that is going to be any issue or not?
2. Move the photos to my personal computer. I don’t use Photos myself, I use Adobe products for photography, so I would load up her old photos in the Photos app.
3. Make the entire catalog a shared family album and share them with her.

That is my initial idea, looking forward to any thoughts here?

posted by silsurf to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

On your Mac, use /Applications/Utilities/Migration Assistant
to extract the files you need.
If you just try to copy things with Finder you will end up with a zillion alias files instead of the actual data.

Once you have copied it, to open up the iPhoto Library, follow these steps:
posted by Lanark at 7:56 AM on December 12, 2020

Best answer: once you've got the photos out of the old backup, you don't need to load them into Photos.app on your computer but can upload them directly to her account (assuming she has her own Apple ID that the iDevices sync to, I'm not sure how shared/family storage plans work). if you log into icloud.com with her account and go to Photos you can use the up-arrow-into-cloud control near the right of the top banner to directly upload to the account, where they'll be (or should be at least) automatically synced to her devices.
posted by russm at 11:39 PM on December 12, 2020

Response by poster: thanks! Didn't know about the direct upload, that saves some grief for sure
posted by silsurf at 6:14 PM on December 13, 2020

Response by poster: Continuation from the above project. I am now moving 4,000 images from one iCloud account to another, there seems to be a known issue with images from older iPhone and dimensions?
if an image is from an older iPhone, Apple seems to not like the dimensions and I get this message:

"There was a problem uploading this file the dimensions of the file are invalid". There is no indication of exactly which image is causing the issue and the uploading process gets stuck and does not complete.

Also, MOV files are not up loadable via iCloud uploads, only to the iDrive

The second problem I can work around, but if anyone has a thought on how to combat the invalid files, please let me know.
Thanks.
posted by silsurf at 6:17 AM on December 28, 2020