Accessing Photos Library in a back up from an external drive

[radiomother]

I bought a new iMac last year and used my Mac Air's Time Machine to back up to the new iMac. BUT I have an older iMac with most of my photos.
That was backed up to a different external drive. If I want to access the photos in the Photos Library that was backed up there and bring some in to my Photos Library on the new iMac, can I do that? Should I do that? And do I need to buy a product to weed out duplicate photos?

Thanks for any help!

 

[chscag]

If I want to access the photos in the Photos Library that was backed up there and bring some in to my Photos Library on the new iMac, can I do that? Should I do that? And do I need to buy a product to weed out duplicate photos?

Yes, you can do that. If you wish, you can even export the entire older library to your new iMac and have two photo libraries instead of one. If you think that there may be duplicate photos, there are several good photo dupe finder apps that you can use to sort them out. The Mac App Store has several such apps you can choose from.

 

[Head_Unit]

You should be able to:
- Connect the external drive
- Open Photos and set it to import
- Point it to the pictures on the external and let it import.
- I haven't used Photos much yet, but Google

Now, do you really want your photos in Photos? I don't, they end up in some folder structure with crazy names and folders and sub-folder I cannot access or understand well. I want my photos in my own folder tree, by date basically, with Photos just pointing to it. So I *believe* there is an option for Photos to "import" but actually leaving the pictures in the folders they are already in. You also don't want Photos (or iTunes) to make duplicates of stuff already on your hard drive, that is a huge space killer. So you might want to just copy your pictures from your external to your internal, then "import"

There is some good food for thought here (I Googled "photos app import duplicates")
http://osxdaily.com/2015/04/21/stop-photos-copying-importing-picture-files-mac-os-x/
http://www.iphonehacks.com/2015/05/how-to-stop-photos-from-creating-duplicate-files-in-mac-os-x.html