This is kind of oldish but should still be fairly accurate: http://lightroomsecrets.com/2009/03/moving-your-images-from-iphoto-to- lightroom/

Hi Ralph,

What you do in fact is exporting from iPhoto, thus exporting all your work from iPhoto as well.

Then LR has them available to read during import.

But for LR alone it would be impossible to extract that, which might still hamper annakscottaps if she/he would not manage to get a running iPhoto-version to trigger the export.

Cornelia

Thankyou for your helpful and timely responses.

Alas, all my photos are in iPhoto, and I need all of them because I combine photos in Photoshop.

So, if I put them into a folder, does that make a copy of all the pictures or just reference where they are? (I do not have the space to copy 1.3 TB of pictures to anywhere.)

And will they be the originals, AND the edited versions, with ALL the meta data? (I cannot imagine re-editing over 10,000 photos, nor doing w/o metadata.)

(I know I cannot import in Lightroom from the EHD because it says no photos found when I click on either iPhoto Library or Metadata Backup, the only choices available.

Click on the black screen shot.)

When I open the EHD, I imagine I would move the two iPhoto Libraries (packages), Europe 2011 n new and iPhoto Library n new into seperate folders, and then drag each folder to the Lightroom window.

(Click on the finder window screen shot.)

I am not sure if you understand LR's concept about handling files: as long as they are not encapsulated by some other software it can reference them from anywhere.

So no need to move images anywhere further on once they are free (out of this encapsulation).

LR can, but does not need to move or copy images: choose the option "ADD" in the import dialog and LR will reference directly in their current location.

A LR import just creates one record per image, pointing to it and collecting all sorts of information (your metadata, your develop settings, your history with them, collection membership, a second interpretation as a virtual copy, ....).

This is why LR is non-destructive.

Now if for some reason you want to move files (e.g. making space on laptop's internal HD after main work on them, to move into more archival network storage), LR needs to know about the new location. The easiest way to ensure this is to drag the folders within LR to their new destination. Then LR will execute this command also on your operating system and physically move files.

If you did outside LR, e.g. in Finder, LR will have lost the pointing destinations and show "?" for missing photo. Then you can re-link, best done on a common parent folder that has also the "?", as all subfolders and images inside will automatically be relinked.

Some advise for this method because they think it is faster than having LR do the move. But it is more dangerous, as you can make mistakes.

So Annakim needs some free disk space anywhere to extract from iPhoto and free the files from that encapsulation.

Should that be a permanently suited storage space (because e.g. on a new 2TB ext. HD - use one root folder "images or pictures" and put everything else e.g. as subfolders underneath), she can use ADD in LR's import dialog and need not move the images further around.

Export from LR is a different thing:

Once you trigger this you are actually instructing LR to write entirely new files, based on the original file and what the record in the catalog says about that file. Thus e.g. you get a *developed JPG from your raw*.

This is something to be used for your immediate purpose, but not worth while to store long-term beyond, as you can easily recreate it any time, as long as you still have the original photo in the folder LR knows about, and your LR catalog which has all the instructions.

So your treasure is

• the original files in the folder structure LR knows about
• your LR catalog

Cornelia

Thank you Cornelia,

You have added much to my understanding of encapsulation and referenced. I see the ADD vs COPY vs MOVE as shown on the black screen shot of Lightroom in my post.

I think I understand that:

ADD = reference (point to) where they are.

COPY = put them on the drive where the Lightroom program is AND keep them in the original location.

MOVE = put them on the drive where Lightroom is AND delete them from the original location.

It seems I will need to 'sacrifice' my backup photo library, that is erase, and move all the iPhoto 'package' to a ?new folder? on this EHD?

Is this a correct understanding? Or do I even need to put the package into a folder?

I am so glad I have firewire 800 connections instead of USB2 on my EHD's, this could take a while!     -annakim

Hi Annakim,

I would never advise you to sacrifice your safety backup.

Please get another 3rd external HD for this operation, as a storage target for releasing your images from iPhoto-encapsulation.

Use one common parent folder on this new disk for all your subfolders, which you may create in accordance with your iPhoto-events if that suited you.

But you could also choose to put all images directly in, without subfolders, as you will have many organisation options in LR via collections. Or into one subfolder per year. A matter of your taste.

You could loan one external hard disk, because after this release and successful import into LR catalog you could do a backup of the released images + your LR catalog on your 2nd drive and give back the 3rd one.

Your iPhoto-drive could still fail before you are done, and then you would desperately need your backup-HD.

Cornelia

Thankyou both for your help. I will take several days to free up enough room on one or more of my EHD's plus defrag my Mac (only because I accidentally filled it to the tip, it's only half full now). It gets complicated. -Annakim

You're all making this way too complicated: just drag&drop your images from iPhoto onto LR – works every time here and on other peoples' Macs.

bfitzsimmons wrote:

 

Will that "Add" them or "Copy" them?

That's entirely up to you. You get the usual import dialogue box with the options to add, move or copy. I wouldn't recommend the 'move' option as you might still want them in iPhoto.

First of all thanks for your excellent posts regarding importing from iPhoto to LR. I have a rather unique situation so please allow me to explain it first and then maybe you can help me to figure out the best way to handle things in the future.

1. I have 185 gigs of photos in iPhoto on a iMac running the Snow Lion and the latest version of iPhoto. It came with a 256 gig SSD drive and a 2TB standard HD. I found out right away that it did not make sense to store my iPhoto library on my SSD drive so I move the Pictures folder with the iPhoto Library file inside to my HD. Now when I open iPhoto it finds the new location automatically and I've freed up a lot of space on my SSD.

2. I purchased the latest version of Lightroom 4.2 for Mac yesterday and began the process of learning how to import my iPhoto photos. I found a post on this site that sent me to another website where directions were given about making an alias of the Originals folder, draging it to the desktop and then importing from that. I found that what used to be called Originals is now called Masters in iPhoto 11. v 9.4.2. Of course you have to tell the iPhoto Libary to Show Package Contents in order to see all of the subfolders in the package, including the Masters folder. Within that folder photos are broken down by year. So I tried first to make an alias of the 2012 subfolder. That worked fine.

3. I then went into LR and selected Import. There I navigated to the alias of the 2012 subfolder and selected Copy. From there I selected the Pictures folder on my SSD. I think you can see the mistake I made. By selecting to put the subfolder 2012 on my SSD I basically defeated the purpose of freeing up space on my SSD drive to begin with. What I think I should have done is create a folder called Light Room Photos on my HDD drive so that the copy of those photos would be placed there.

4. What still bothers me is that I am doubling the amount of space I am using if I pull all 185 gigs of photos dating back to 1998 from iPhoto to LR.

5. So my question is simpy is there a way to not have to create a whole new batch of thousands of photos so that LR can work with them? In reading more of the posts I see that someone said to make an alias of your iPhoto Library and then instead off selecting Copy select Add instead. That way you are not using up a lot of extra space and are only referencing the photos already in the iPhoto libary, which in my case has been moved to the larger HDD drive and off the SDD drive which is my startup drive. I haven't tried this yet because I'm afraid that my Light Room 4 Catalogue file will get big and I'm back where I started. Is there a way to move my LR Catalogue file to my HDD drive instead of keeping it in my Pitctures folder within my User folder on my SSD drive? I see no way to select a new destination for my Lightroom folder or a place to just put the LR Catalogue folder. And my second question is what happens to the Metadata? I appears that when I imported the photos into LR using my initial method they show a creation date of today, not when they were taken. Because I am so new to LR I may not be looking in the right placce but help with this issue would also be appreciated.

Hi Tim,

4. What still bothers me is that I am doubling the amount of space I am using if I pull all 185 gigs of photos dating back to 1998 from iPhoto to LR.

5. So my question is simpy is there a way to not have to create a whole new batch of thousands of photos so that LR can work with them? In reading more of the posts I see that someone said to make an alias of your iPhoto Library and then instead off selecting Copy select Add instead. That way you are not using up a lot of extra space and are only referencing the photos already in the iPhoto libary, which in my case has been moved to the larger HDD drive and off the SDD drive which is my startup drive. I haven't tried this yet because I'm afraid that my Light Room 4 Catalogue file will get big and I'm back where I started. Is there a way to move my LR Catalogue file to my HDD drive instead of keeping it in my Pitctures folder within my User folder on my SSD drive?

It does not make sense to manage your images both in LR and in iPhoto.

If you would really want to, then yes, it is advisable to double them so there will be no interference.

Why not doubling them for the moment (on your HD, not SSD), and see later if you like LR sufficiently to ditch them from iPhoto?

You can place your LR catalog = the *.lrcat-file anywhere you like. Double-Clicking it will open it in LR. Then you can select in preference settings to always open the last catalog, or specifically this catalog, when opening LR.

The catalog file will not become too big. mine is ca. 1.5 GB for some 110'000 images.

What takes much more space is the folder with the previews that LR will create. How much depends on your taste and speed needs.

As I do not want to wait for "Loading..." in Library module I dedicate quite some space to the previews folder (actually ca. 100 GB!), because I set the preview size big in pixel dimensions for a big screen and high in quality. This is because I use a laptop, and want to be able to show images due to their preview when I travel, without having my originals available (they are on a NAS at home***).

In terms of LR performance you benefit most if you put both your lrcat-file as well as the previews folder (...Previews.lrdata) on your SSD, as it is advantageous to use the quick reading speed.

Your actual image-files may well be stored on the HD, as LR accesses them less often.

If you are not so keen on LR agility, you can put everything on your HD.

Separating the lrcat-file from its Previews.lrdata-folder is not foreseen by Adobe, but possible - Victoria Bampton gives a workaround for that in her "The missing FAQ for Lightroom). Then, of course, you would forego again the speed of your SSD accessing/writing previews and just grab the speed advantage for the lrcat-file.

If you are very concerned about storage space on your SSD why not start with everything on your HD? Then if you get impatient with LR's response times, you know the first tweak would be to move catalog+previews to the SSD?

Cornelia

***Note: Develop actions are not possible, if I have no access to the images, but Library actions like rating, keywording and other metadata adding, as well as browsing them.