How can I effectively UN-MERGE an iPhoto library?

May 18, 2022 11:16 AM

So I screwed up. I'm an amateur photographer and have thousands of photos in my iPhoto cloud account. I was in the process of transferring my old iPad to my brother and hit the wrong button when changing accounts, and now I accidentally merged the thousands of photos that were saved from my iCloud account into my brother's iCloud account and now he's being prompted constantly to upgrade his account. Are there any tools to help filter and delete photos and videos from iCloud/iPhoto by any useful means like which camera/phone they were taken with or location? Nothing is too hacky of a solution!
posted by gzimmer to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Response by poster: Note that I only have the iPad, our iPhones, and a Windows PC to deal with this. No desktop/laptop Mac computers. So any software that requires MacOS wouldn't be helpful.
posted by gzimmer at 11:18 AM on May 18, 2022

If you had a mac, you could set up a Smart Album within Photos, which lets you sort on various fields:
* Camera Model
* Aperture
* Focal Length
* ISO
etc.

If you got lucky, you could probably find a way to distinguish the photos, and then delete the non-wanted ones.

I don't know if this smart album feature works via iCloud, though.
posted by soylent00FF00 at 4:09 PM on May 18, 2022

Smart Albums are as Mac-only feature, unfortunately. https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/create-smart-albums-pht6d60ca71/mac

I suspect the best way to resolve this is to go into an Apple Store, and have a genius work through this by logging your brother into iCloud on a "loaner" Mac, and untangling things there.
posted by misterbrandt at 4:21 PM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

There are some "smart albums" of sorts on iOS, but I assume you already tried these and they were not helpful -- there is the "People & Places" set of smart albums in the "Albums" tab on the iOS Photos app. That will let you do some level of geographic filtering.
posted by misterbrandt at 4:22 PM on May 18, 2022

If you're not near an Apple store you can effectively rent an M1 Mac that pretends it's a VM for €0.1/hour (there may be a setup fee, but I couldn't see one right away). With that you could use the smart albums previously mentioned.
posted by tiamat at 6:01 PM on May 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is it possible to restore from a previous point somehow? Or perhaps if you still have all the photos separate on each device, get rid of the iCloud photos (perhaps move or rename them to mitigate risk) and then re-upload them to iCloud from each separate device?
posted by dg at 11:54 PM on May 18, 2022

Response by poster: The solution I'm currently pursuing is running a docker instance of Photoprism on my NAS server.
https://photoprism.app/

It can scan the photo dump for EXIF data and AI face detection then tag appropriately. I'm doing a test run on my own photo library now, but if all goes well, I can upload my brother's iPhoto library as a separate folder, scan it for any helpful metadata, then filter to the best of my ability.
posted by gzimmer at 10:00 AM on May 19, 2022