Advice for organizing photos when upgrading macs

Hello,

I have a Macbook with 15,000 photos, and I've just purchased a new Macbook Pro. I am overwhelmed at the thought of transferring all my photos because my iphoto is a complete mess. I have doubles and triples of photos, I created new Events for different groups of photos before I knew about Albums.
I want a fresh start with fabulously organized photos, but I have no idea where to go from here. Should I spend hours sorting and organizing them on my Macbook (Tiger OS, iPhoto 08) and then transfer them to the Macbook Pro (Snow Leopard)? Or is there a better way to sort through them and organize them in iPhoto (can't remember what version is on my new Mac, but something newer) as I import them?

Any advice will be MUCH appreciated, thanks!

There may be a better way to do this, but if you export all of your photos to an external drive, you can then inport them to iPhoto on your new Mac. When iPhoto hits the first duplicate it will ask what do to do. You can then tell it to skip duplicates and apply this to all subsequent.
That should take care of the duplicates issue . . . as far as organizing and sorting, I'm still working on that myself. :Blushing:

Razormac said:

There may be a better way to do this, but if you export all of your photos to an external drive, you can then inport them to iPhoto on your new Mac. When iPhoto hits the first duplicate it will ask what do to do. You can then tell it to skip duplicates and apply this to all subsequent.
That should take care of the duplicates issue . . . as far as organizing and sorting, I'm still working on that myself. :Blushing:

Click to expand...

That's probably the easiest way to get rid of duplicates, etc.
As far as organizing, you might want to skip iPhoto and just use Finder to organize (similar to how files are on Windows). It depends on if you use iPhoto for any of its features or not. i.e. Slideshow, editing, etc. If all you want is photo files on your Mac, put them in folders in Finder.

Otherwise, the above advice is best if you plan to use iPhoto. Exporting will separate them out as individual files and not group them in Events like iPhoto does. Then you can do whatever you want with them before moving them to your new Mac.

There's a nice little $8 bit of shareware that can REALLY help with this called Duplicate Annihilator. That + iPhoto's ability to make/use more than one library = win