1. Mar 18, 2020 How to export unmodified originals. In the Photos app, then select the photos and videos that you want to export. To select multiple items, press and hold the Command key while you. Choose File Export Export Unmodified Original. An export dialog appears. If your photos include IPTC metadata.
2. Apr 08, 2015 If it's just always on, then the library will be ready whenever you are. When you're ready to merge, open your Aperture library in Photos. To do this, quit Photos, then re-launch it while holding the Option key, which will allow you to choose any Photos, Aperture or iPhoto library on your system.
3. Nov 11, 2015 Open Photos while holding the Option key. Select your desired Library to open. Select all items and export them to a folder. Quit and re-open Photos while holding the Option key. Select a second library to open. Import all of the items into this second library.
4. May 07, 2015  A window will pop up with a number, which in my Mac’s case was over 236GB between a number of different photo libraries — Apple’s Photo Booth, Aperture, iPhoto, and Photos, just to name a.

1. How To Combine Iphoto Libraries
2. My Photo Libraries
3. Free Photo Libraries

How To Combine Iphoto Libraries

Merging libraries. Select any set or all photos. Choose Export. From the Export dialog box, choose either Current or Original from the Kind pop-up menu, then click Export. Choose a destination and click OK. Drag the exported photos into the Photos library or use File Import to select and import. Merging libraries. Select any set or all photos. Choose Export. From the Export dialog box, choose either Current or Original from the Kind pop-up menu, then click Export. Choose a destination and click OK. Drag the exported photos into the Photos library or use File Import to select and import. Now, starting with the smallest Photos library and working up in size, follow these steps for each library you want to merge: Double-click the Photos library to open it. In Photos Preferences General, click Use as System Photo Library. (If it’s dimmed out, that library is already set as the System Photo Library.) Wait for photos to upload.

Merging Photos libraries

Update (11/3/2015): PowerPhotos 1.1 now supports library merging!

Unlike iPhoto Library Manager, PowerPhotos does not yet have the capability to merge libraries together. This is something I’d like to add to PowerPhotos, though I can’t make any concrete promises, since doing so partially depends on whether Photos itself adds a few necessary enhancements. In the meantime, since I get asked about this a lot, I thought I’d put up a quick summary of the existing methods to get your content all together into a single Photos library.

Merge your iPhoto libraries beforehand

At this point, most people looking to merge libraries together have existing iPhoto or Aperture libraries that they’re either planning to migrate to Photos, or have already done so. Since merging options with Photos itself are very limited, if you do want to merge your libraries, it will be much easier to first merge everything together as iPhoto libraries, then take the resulting merged iPhoto library and migrate *that* to Photos afterward.

If you haven’t migrated any of your existing libraries yet, then simply use iPhoto Library Manager to merge the libraries together first, then open the merged library in Photos to let it perform the migration (Aperture can also be used to merge iPhoto libraries, though it doesn’t perform duplicate detection like iPLM does). If you have already migrated some/all of your iPhoto libraries though, you may still be able to follow this route. Photos leaves the original iPhoto library intact after performing the migration, so as long as you haven’t deleted the iPhoto library yourself, you should be able to go back and perform the merge, then migrate the merged library to Photos.

To migrate an iPhoto library a second time, the easiest way is to use the File > Migrate iPhoto Libraries command in PowerPhotos. Just check the box next to the iPhoto library and click Migrate, and PowerPhotos will take care of the details. To do it without PowerPhotos, you’ll need to open the library in iPhoto first, and it should give you a brief messing saying that the library has been migrated to Photos already. Click the “Open in iPhoto” button, then close the library back up. Then, take the iPhoto library and drop it on the Photos icon in the dock, and it will perform the migration a second time.

If you have imported any newer photos into Photos since you performed your first migration, those photos will not have been imported into iPhoto, and thus will be missing from the merged library. If this is the case, you’ll just need to either export those photos from the first Photos library that you migrated, then import them into the second library, or just reimport/redownload them from your iPhone or wherever they may have come from.

Mac photos closing the library stuck. Use iCloud to merge your content

The other technique that can be used here is to merge everything together by uploading it into your iCloud Photo Library. This will work with any Photos library, whether it was migrated from iPhoto originally or not, and can be used to merge libraries on different Macs (though they must be using the same iCloud account). The basic workflow for this is:

1. First, you’ll want to choose which one of your libraries you want to ultimately be the merged library, that will ultimately hold all the content.
2. Open that library in Photos, open the preferences window, and click the “Use as System Photo Library” button. Then, in the iCloud section of the preferences, enable iCloud Photo Library. Make sure that the “Download Original to this Mac” option is enabled.
3. Photos will start syncing your library with iCloud, uploading all of the full size photos from your Photos library.
4. If you already have other devices with iCloud Photo Library enabled (e.g. your iPhone or iPad), in addition to uploading all the photos in your Photos library, it will also download any photos that have already been synced with those devices.
5. Once that library has been fully synced (this may take quite some time if the library is large, even multiple days), open a different library in Photos, and repeat the same steps. The content from the second library will be added to what’s already in iCloud Photo Library.
6. By default, syncing the second library with iCloud will also download all the content from the first library into the second library onto your Mac. However, if you enable the “Optimize Mac Storage” option in the iCloud preferences in Photos, that will only initially download smaller thumbnail versions of each photo, which can speed up this part of the process and use less disk space and bandwidth.
7. If you have more than two libraries, repeat the same steps for each library you want to merge.
8. Once you’ve processed the rest of the libraries, open the first one up again, enable iCloud Photo Library on it, and let it redownload all the full sized photos that were uploaded from the other libraries.

While this is an effective way to get your libraries merged together, there are a few significant downsides:

1. If you have a significant amount of photos that you need to merge together, it’s going to take a lot of time, bandwidth, and disk space to perform all of this uploading and downloading from iCloud. For really large collections, you may be looking at a project spanning multiple days or even weeks.
2. iCloud only provides 5 GB of storage for free, so if your collection exceeds that (which is not difficult), you’ll need to purchase one of Apple’s larger storage plans, at least while you’re doing all the syncing. If you’re not interested in using iCloud Photo Library in the long run, it is possible to bump up your storage for a short time, remove the photos from iCloud once you’ve gotten everything downloaded back to your Mac, then move your account back down to the basic storage plan.
3. If you have an iOS device also synced with iCloud, it will start to download all the content that you’re uploading, which can sometimes eat up bandwidth and battery life. You may want to enable the “optimize storage” option in the Photos section of the Settings app on your iOS device before starting, or just turn off iCloud Photo Library altogether if you want to prevent that.
4. There are a few limitations to what will sync through iCloud, which you can read about here

Those are the main two techniques that can be used to merge your photos together into a single Photos library. Each of them has its downsides, but hopefully if you want to get all your photos in one place, one of this options will work for you.

As of OS X Yosemite, Apple is encouraging everyone to use its new Photos program for managing pictures in OS X. While Photos has a number of pros and cons, it does share a limitation of its “iPhoto” predecessor, in that while it uses a library system for managing photos and offers an option to create multiple libraries, it can only have one open at a time. This means that if you wish to consolidate libraries, you might find yourself jumping through hoops; however, there is a relatively simple way to get this done.

My Photo Libraries

First, the classic way of doing this would be to use an export/import option:

1. Open Photos while holding the Option key
2. Select your desired Library to open
3. Select all items and export them to a folder
4. Quit and re-open Photos while holding the Option key
5. Select a second library to open
6. Import all of the items into this second library.

This approach will undoubtedly take a long time, and will require you essentially duplicate your library contents more than once to consolidate them import them all into the second library. While it may be doable for those with only a few libraries to manage, for those with a number of different libraries, the following approach may be more streamlined:

1. Open Photos to load your current library (or open with the Option key held to choose a different or new library to use)
2. Open the Terminal utility (in the Applications > Utilities folder)
3. Type the following command, then hold the Option key immediately after pressing Enter to execute it:

When you do this, a second instance of the Photos application will open, and will request you select a library. Do this for a different library, and you will now have two Photos windows on your screen with different libraries open. Now you can select some or all the photos from one library, and drag them into the second Photos window to add them to that library. You can do this for individual photos, entire moments, or custom selections as you browse through your photos.

Note that copying in this manner may cause Photos to briefly hang and show your cursor as a spinning beachball, but do not interrupt the process. After a short while, your photos will be copied and show up in your second library. You will also see a notification that confirms the number of photos imported.

This window will pop up if you held the Option key at the appropriate time when launching an instances of Photos (if not, then quit Photos and try again). Use it to select a photo library other than the one open in your primary instance of Photos.

When done, close the second instance of the Photos application, and then repeat the Terminal command (press the Up arrow to quickly load the previously-entered command–be sure to hold the Option key after pressing Enter), to load a new library and copy your files into your main library.

Free Photo Libraries

One quick warning with this approach, is that you should not load the same library in two separate instances of Photos, as this may lead to conflicts in how data in the library is handled, and could corrupt the library. Therefore, just be sure you load separate libraries in separate instances of Photos, and you should be good to go.