Photos Library merge

[rens51]

Hi friends,
In the past I've unfortunately created multiple libraries in Photos. See attachment. I know I can select a library when I hold the option key when I open the Photos program. All my libraries are out of sink on count (and large), but with many duplicates.
Is there a way to bring all photo files into the Systems Photos Library and delete all other libraries?
I've searched this site and Apples help without success.
I also notice Photostream seems to have hick-ups (after the last s/w updates?) I have the latest OS Big Sur 11.1 and on my iPhone 8 I have iOS 14.3
Thanks for your advice, Rens

 

[IWT]

Hi rens51. I'm sorry that you are in this mess.

I can tell you that your Aperture libraries (empty or otherwise) cannot be opened in macOS 11 Big Sur. There are 32 bit components which make this impossible. I speak as one who has a very large Aperture library. Notification was give well in advance and I was able to convert it to a Photos library.

As regards the other Photos Libraries, I don't know of any means of amalgamating them.

However, you could try this:

Get an External Hard Drive (EHD), format it APFS, then go into each Photos library that you want to get rid off. In each library, view All Photos, then click on one, then use Command plus A to select them all. Then Export these to your EHD.

Then open your System Photo Library, choose File > Import and navigate to your EHD and import all the pictures to your System Photo Library. Do this for all libraries (apart from Aperture). In the end of this tedious process, you will have one System Photo Library with all the pictures from the others imported to it via your EHD.

Ian

Edited to substitute the correct term.

 

[MacInWin]

One comment: I think what Ian meant to say was to EXPORT the images to the external drive, not COPY them. If you do an Export, the image name is preserved, but if you Copy/Paste, you get the item number of the item in the Photos database (I think) as the filename. At least, that's how it worked on my system.

 

[rens51]

Thank you both very much for these suggestions. I will give it a try!

 

[IWT]

I think what Ian meant to say was to EXPORT the images to the external drive, not COPY them

Correct. Silly misuse of terminology. Apologies.

Ian