Importing Apple Photos to LR *without* Photos.app

[Aaron____B]

Problem: The standard "how to import Apple Photos to Lightroom" guide calls for you to select "Download All Originals" in Photos > Preferences before migrating. I learned this from LinkedIn Learning's Richard Harrington ... who then immediately followed that with, "I'm not going to do that here because I'm on a laptop."

Well, I'm on a laptop too! And I don't have 61GB free to download all my originals from iCloud.

So let's say I export the originals to a folder on an external drive and then hoover them into Lightroom. Is any metadata or anything else going to be left behind? I guess I will have to re-rotate my images, won't I? 

[Michael J. Hoffman · Accepted solution]

I've not done this in a mass production way (since I used LR before I had a Mac), but I've never had a problem with photo rotation when I export originals from the Photos app. Exporting the original will give you the standard metadata like camera, lens, exposure, date/time, gps data if available, etc. You would lose any association with specific albums or favorites.

Instead of exporting all your photos at once, experiment with a few suspect photos and see what you get. Then you can adjust your process accordingly.

[Aaron____B]

That's great, worked like a charm.

There is so much metadata to manage and I've been worried — for that reason — about taking it out of Photos. Then I realized I've been using Adobe apps longer than iWork apps ............