How to migrate referenced files in Mac Photos to Lightroom Classic?

Report · Jul 26, 2022

I have about 52gb of photos that are referenced by Mac Photos. They are not stored in the Mac Photos library, and I have assigned a lot of keywords to them that I do not want to lose. I would like to migrate this library to Lightroom Classic, keeping the referenced images in the same place, but keeping the keywords I've assigned. I've searched, but can find no way to directly migrate all the keywords to Lightroom Classic; please let me know if there is a way.

As far as I can tell, there is no option to migrate directly from Mac Photos to Lightroom Classic, but Adobe does seem to support migrating to Lightroom CC (which I have access to). If I do a two step process, Photos to Lightroom CC to Lightroom Classic, how will referenced images be handled? Do I have to upload all the images to Lightroom CC, or can Lightroom CC worked with referenced files stored on my local Mac?

I believe Mac Photos does not write the keywords to the exif data on the file; does anyone know if there is a program that can take the keywords and write it to the exif data of images? If so, I was thinking that might be a way to get the images and keywords into Lightroom Classic.

Thanks.

Report · Jul 27, 2022

Note there is no longer a "Lightroom CC". There is simply Lightroom (part of the LR cloud ecosystem) and Lightroom Classic. It's important to use the current names, since Adobe has confused things greatly with its constant name changes.

Importing the Photos library into Lightroom (cloudy) doesn't bring in keywords, according to my tests just now.

You can do a manual migration directly to LR Classic by doing the Photo's command File > Export > Export Unmodified Original and selecting the option Export IPTC As XMP. That will export copies of the original (unedited) photos, with all their metadata (including keywords) written into corresponding .xmp sidecars. For raws, LR will read those .xmp sidecars and get the keywords, but unfortunately LR ignores .xmp sidecars for JPEGs and other non-raw formats. You'd have to use the free Exiftool utility to copy the contents of the .xmp sidecars into the JPEGs and other non-raws (Google for recipes -- it's a steep learning curve).

The simplest option is to use the Avalanche program to do the migration. There have been a lot of good reports on the forums about it working well to convert Apple Aperture libraries, but I don't recall reports about people using it for Photos. It will bring over the photos, their metadata, and convert edits into LR edits (preserving the originals). It costs $59, which may seem expensive, but how much do you value your photos and your time? It's got a free trial.

Report · Jul 28, 2022

Thanks for this very informative response. I also experimented and found that there seemed to be no simple easy way to get the sidecars into LR. I did find the free program osxphotos that is able to write keywords and other metadata to the exif info in an image file. If I did this, then presumably LR would be able to see the keywords when an image was imported. A drawback of this approach is that copies of each image would be made (or the originals modified) and it might take me quite a while to figure out how to use osxphotos (but the author seems very helpful in the forum). I looked at Avalanche and was willing to pay for it, but the website said the ability to convert from Photos to LR Classic was 'coming soon'. I emailed Avalanche and they promptly replied the website was outdated and Avalanche is able to migrate from Photos to LR Classic. So I will likely get Avalanche and use it for the migration. Avalanche does seem to be the simplest option.

Report · Jul 28, 2022

"the website said the ability to convert from Photos to LR Classic was 'coming soon'."

Yeah, they're pretty bad at keeping their web site updated. The conversion from Photos has been available for at least 6 months, maybe more.

To help others, please let us know how Avalanche works out for you (or doesn't).

Report · Jul 30, 2022

I decided to give Avalanche a try and wanted to report back about my experience with it. I downloaded the free trial and it migrated 100 images. I was very pleased to see that it did an excellent job of associating keywords with the images. However a problem was that in almost half of my images the migrated Lightroom Classic library had the wrong filename for referenced images, and thus was unable to find or see the image. This would make Avalanche basically unusable for me, and I wrote CYME (the developers of Avalanche) about it. I was pleasantly surprised to get a quick response asking for more information so they could figure out what was going wrong. I submitted the info, and by the next morning I had an email saying they had figured out the source of the bug and would fix it and release an update in a day or so. The developer explained to me why the problem arose and how they intended to fix it. I consider this superb customer service, and have never had a developer explain to me why a bug that I submitted arose. I'm looking forward to the update, and if it can now handle all my referenced files, I'm going to purchase Avalanche.

Report · Jul 30, 2022

That's consistent so far with the service people have reported before using Avalanche for migrating from Aperture -- hope it goes well.

Report · Apr 04, 2023

It has been about nine months since I wrote the above, about my experience with Avalanche and my interactions with CYME, and I thought I'd give an update. Originally the developers wrote that they figured out the source of the bug and would fix it in a new release. Unfortunately their fixes didn't work. I sent them my libraries so they could see what was happening, and but eventually they simply stopped responding to my emails. I did buy a copy of Avalanche, but unfortunately for most of the images in Photos it got the wrong filename (left off the date at the beginning of the filenames). I finally realized that almost all of these errors occurred in images that were from my old Aperture library. Fortunately I still had the old Aperture library around, so I ran it through Avalanche and the filenames were correct in the catalog it produced. Then I went to the catalog that Avalanche generated from Photos and simply deleted all the material that was imported from Aperture. Then I merged these two Lightroom catalogs, which gave me roughly what was in my original Photos library. So eventually I was able to make use of Avalanche to get my images and keywords out of Photos, but it wasn't easy and took a long time. It didn't work as advertised, but since I still had my Aperture library I was able to make it work.

Report · Apr 04, 2023

Thanks for that update, that will help others.