For any of you out there who are like me and move between PC and Mac for your workflow, or those who are considering migrating your workflow completely from the Windows world to the Mac environment, here is a simple step-by-step guide for moving over your most important asset.
Luckily, it’s easy to move the Photos library on your Mac onto an external drive. Then, whenever you open the Photos app on your Mac, it will access this drive and show you your photos (as long. Having and trying to use multiple Photo management apps for the same photos will cause headaches and conflicts as these photo management try to compete with each other for access to the same photos. My recommendation is to prevent the Photo App from starting and controlling the photo stream. I briefly covered Affinity Photo in a previous post, and it is an excellent Photoshop alternative. I've been using it more and more lately, and that includes using it in conjunction with Lightroom as an external editor. This is pretty easy to set up but there are a few limitations unfortunately. Part 3: How to Edit Pictures on Photos for Mac. Mac Photos app not only plays the role of a photo management software, but also performs a part as photo editor app. Assisted by this all-round Photos for macOS, you can easily add special effects on your images including Enhance, Rotate, Crop, Filters, Adjust, Retouch and Red-eye. Lightroom doesn't move your photos, only storing information about them and your edits to them. Here's how to be sure you're backing up the right files, including the catalog and your presets.
I am a hybrid. Hip hop recording software mac. Having spent many, many years, including my early photography years fully inside of a Windows environment, using a PC is pretty much second nature to me. That's not to say that Macs are particularly complicated. But working on a Mac for me is a bit like speaking a second language. I can get my point across but it takes a second to do the translation in my head before I can find the correct words.
As my career developed and I moved from shooting for fun to shooting for profit, I also moved away from the small display on the back of my camera to shooting tethered to a laptop at least 99 percent of the time. With Mac being pretty much the standard among my commercial clientele, I invested in a MacBook Pro, loaded it with Capture One, and never looked back. Tethering allowed my work to move forward tenfold. Not only does it allow me to communicate with my clients in real time, it also gives me a better view of what I am actually creating and the gives me the confidence to walk off set knowing for sure that I have the shot.
But, while tethering to my Mac allowed me to move my photography forward leaps and bounds, my understanding of how Macs handle files was somewhat limited. This was especially important when it came to working with one of my most important assets: my Lightroom catalog.
Lightroom is the tool I have used to organize and catalog my images ever since the beginning of my career. It's been with me from the learning phase all the way through the making a living phase. It holds the key to my digital life over the last decade and contains, at the moment, just north of a quarter-million images.
It should be noted here that this ever vital asset has always lived exclusively on my PC desktop. Sure, I had Lightroom installed on my Mac as well, but I never really used it. I was a bit intimidated by the process in truth. I was sure I could figure it out, but, being a scaredy cat, I was also pretty positive that I would screw up my precious catalog in the process.
But as I do more and more jobs on location out of town, and my office PC begins to slow down, I finally decided to try and figure out how to move my catalog from my PC onto my Mac. As it turns out, it's actually not really all that difficult. Manufacturer serial number identifier. Here's how to do it.
Step 1: Figure Out Where Your Lightroom Catalog Lives on Your PC
Go to Edit > Catalog Setting.
Step 2: Open the Folder Containing the Catalog![]()
By location, click Show.
Step 3: Copy Both the Catalog File and the Previews
The file for the catalog itself will end in .lrcat. It is the actual catalog. You don't technically have to copy the preview folder if you don't want to, but doing so will prevent the destination Mac from having to recreate the previews in the future. So, you can save yourself time and headache by copying both.
Copy these to a jump drive, a cloud drive, or whatever other method you desire. Copy these files onto your Mac.
Step 4: Open Lightroom and Open the Catalog
File > Open Catalog
Step 5: Enjoy Lightroom on Your Mac
Yep. It was really that easy. Not sure why it took me so long to do that.
On a side note, if you see a little exclamation mark by the images in your catalog, have no fear. All that means is that you need to reconnect that image in your catalog to its source file. I, for example, tend to keep my originals on external devices as opposed to my internal hard drives. So all you need to do is connect that device to the new Mac, click on the exclamation mark (!), and chose Locate File. Find that file on the external drive, and bingo you are up and running.
Mac users with a need to migrate image catalogs to another hosting app have found that process difficult to impossible. Help is here, in the form of a new app called Avalanche Unlimited from CYME Software. The app can deal with migration from Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Luminar 4, Capture One, and Apple Photos. The latter two are coming soon as a free update.
Migrating libraries can be a real pain point, and I hear from an increasing number of photographers who are moving away from Lightroom, but don't want to lose their library data. Since Aperture is no longer supported by Apple, people want to easily move those libraries elsewhere. There have been solutions for some of these migrations, like an Adobe plugin that can get both Apple Photos and Aperture into Lightroom, but it doesn't get everything. But Avalanche Unlimited is like a Swiss Army knife allowing you to move your libraries from anywhere to almost anywhere else.
Features
Compatibility
The software uses machine learning, so all standard edits (white balance, light, color) are migrated using machine language in such a way that the image will look the same in the destination catalog. Also, black and white conversion is fully supported for the highest accuracy.
The software was developed by Aperture users who wanted an easy way to migrate their data elsewhere without losing their edits. I tried the software on a small Lightroom library. It's small because I use mainly use Adobe bridge, which I find a lighter-weight solution, although it doesn't have much power.
You can start by dropping a catalog on the app, or it can look in the usual places.
Move Imported Photos To Photo Library
I set the software to look for libraries on my Mac, and it found the Lightroom data. I gave it the option to migrate to a Luminar 4 library, and it asked where the folder for that was. And off the software went.
It did convert the images, much of the metadata and edits, but the problem is the Luminar catalog is pretty weak compared to Lightroom, which is amazingly full-featured. The folks at CYME software know that, and they told me they create a side database called 'migration_database' with all the data that Luminar can't handle as of now but might be able to ingest later. They add that even if Luminar is not on par with Lightroom when it comes to organizing and annotating, they keep those tags in a safe place for now. Either Skylum or CYME will be able to leverage that data at some point in the future, when or if Luminar becomes a grown-up library manager.
Move Pictures To Photos Mac
There were a few errors in my migration, largely because I'd moved the original photos off my disk and didn't keep Lightroom updated.
Move Pictures From Mac Photos App To Lightroom Preset
Since I really don't use Lightroom as a library much and Aperture is long gone from my computer, my testing was a bit limited. CYME offers a free trial of the software so you can see if it suits your needs. It's $119.99 to buy from the Mac App Store. Updates are free, which will be welcome as the software adds more migration options.
How To Move Photos From Mac Photos To Lightroom
Still, Avalanche Unlimited is an impressive app and a good idea.
Unless I needed the migrations it can do now, I think I'd wait for the next version that adds Photos and Capture One. Luminar users who are leaving Lightroom will find it useful, but as I mentioned, the Luminar catalogs just aren't mature yet, even though they are improving.
Moving Photos From Apple Photos To Lightroom
Clear cahce for roes mac mojave. So, if you have a use for Avalanche, go for it. I expect it will be rapidly adding features, and for Mac users migrating from one software suite to another, it's a worthwhile piece of software.
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