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Help With Migrating iPhotos to Photos from Old Mac to New.

B

Big Tav

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 2, 2009
32
0
Sydney, Australia
Hi everyone, I am having trouble with migrating my photos from one laptop to the new one. I will try and explain my situation as best as I can and sorry if I ramble!

I have a 15" Mac Book Pro Mid 2010 which is as slow as a wet week. It has a 250gb HDD. I have an external drive as well which is about 1.5TB I think. My iPhoto filled up my Hard Drive on the computer so I made a iPhoto library 1 and moved it to the Back Up drive. I then filled the laptop hard drive again with another iPhoto library (lets call it Library 2)

The old back up drive has a USB3 cable too. (ACTUALLY IT HAS A FIREWIRE 800)

I updated the software on my old laptop to I think it's Sierra now which has photos and it migrated all the photos on the Mac from iPhoto to Photos which is good.

I have now bought a Macbook pro 2017 13" running the latest software. I have also bought a new 2tb external drive with USB-C etc.

I used the Switch/Migration assistant to copy my old mac to the new one and it has done that just fine.

This is where the problem is.

I can't get my old iPhoto library 1 to come across too. I tried copying it (very) slowly from the old external drive to the new one. Took overnight to do it. The new computer wouldn't read the file on the new External HDD though. I could see the file but it looked broken and greyed out? I am thinking it is either encrypted or since the new Macbok doesn't have iPhotos on it it just wont read it.

Can anyone help with any ideas on how to get my old photos from my old external drive with iPhoto (it's a big file) to my new laptop/HDD without losing them?

I don't think uploading them to a cloud then downloading them will work either as it's a really bike file. At least 10,000 photos.

Please help! I m really worried I am going to get this wrong and lose all of our memories.

Hear from you soon! :)
 
Last edited:
Can you connect the external drive (that has the pics on it) to the new MBP?
When you do this, does the MBP show up on the desktop (in the finder)?

If you can do all this, can you copy OTHER files (not pics) from the external drive to the new MBP?

We are just trying to ascertain that the drive is properly formatted, working correctly and that the file structure is usable. Even if you can't copy the Photos files.

Having said that...
Can you open Photos on the new MBP, and then try to "import" from external drive (you may have been trying that already)?
Not "copy" ... but import instead.

There are some 3rd party utilities out there that can fix iPhoto/Photos library problems, I have never used one but I believe they are available.
 
Fishrrman said:
Can you connect the external drive (that has the pics on it) to the new MBP?
When you do this, does the MBP show up on the desktop (in the finder)?

If you can do all this, can you copy OTHER files (not pics) from the external drive to the new MBP?

We are just trying to ascertain that the drive is properly formatted, working correctly and that the file structure is usable. Even if you can't copy the Photos files.

Having said that...
Can you open Photos on the new MBP, and then try to "import" from external drive (you may have been trying that already)?
Not "copy" ... but import instead.

There are some 3rd party utilities out there that can fix iPhoto/Photos library problems, I have never used one but I believe they are available.
Click to expand...

Hi Fishrrman,

Thanks for the reply. The old one won't connect to the new mac as it has a USB3 cable I think it's called. It's like a big square. The new macbook only has USB-C.

I did hook the new external drive up to the old computer. I dragged the iphoto library across to the new HDD. It took ages! When I went and plugged it into the new macbook the files showed it was there but it was greyed out with like a broken look to it.

Does that make sense? I was thinking the problem might be the old HDD is formatted in an older iOS and the new one won't recognise it.
 
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You could attach both external drives to your old computer (might need an adapter or cable for the USB-C drive) and move the file directly to the other external drive. It will take a very long time over USB 2.0 though. A faster but more expensive way would be to get a FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter and a Thunderbolt cable and connect both to the new computer. You could use your old drive with it then I suppose.
 
I think that to connect a firewire drive to a 2017 MBPro (which has tbolt3 ports) you need TWO adapters:
- Firewire to tbolt2 adapter
- tbolt2 to tbolt3 adapter
... and there's still no guarantee that it will work.

So...
Best way to get data from firewire drive to MBP is to use an older Mac to connect firewire drive AND a USB drive, and then "move stuff over" from the firewire drive to the USB drive.

Then...
Connect the USB drive to the new Mac.
 
Fishrrman said:
I think that to connect a firewire drive to a 2017 MBPro (which has tbolt3 ports) you need TWO adapters:
- Firewire to tbolt2 adapter
- tbolt2 to tbolt3 adapter
... and there's still no guarantee that it will work.

So...
Best way to get data from firewire drive to MBP is to use an older Mac to connect firewire drive AND a USB drive, and then "move stuff over" from the firewire drive to the USB drive.

Then...
Connect the USB drive to the new Mac.
Click to expand...
Oh right, would definitely need both adapters. But it would work fine. Just depends on how much time he wants to spend transferring it. Probably $80-100 of adapters and cables though.
 
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