How to retrieve photos in iPhoto

[AndreaM]

When I upgraded to Catalina, I lost access to various applications, including iPhoto. However, I have a lot of photos there which are not in other folders and I wondered if there was a way to retrieve them before uninstalling iPhoto.

I have also found my MacBook Pro to have become slower and slower over the last year or so, possibly due to applications which are no longer supported, and the battery also looks like it is failing, so I have bought myself a new MacBook Pro and want to ensure that any incompatible apps are removed before transferring the data to my new machine.

How do I know what applications are a problem? I have removed any with the 'No Entry' symbol (except iPhoto until I know if I can retrieve my photos). Obviously, I don't want to transfer existing problems over to my new laptop.

Did Apple offer any alternative to iPhoto so that we can continue to edit photos?

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello.

iPhoto was replaced by Photos in OS X 10.10.3 Yosemite, and there was an automatic import of your iPhoto Library to the Photos app at that time. I am not sure if Catalina supports the upgrade/migration from iPhoto to Photos. It may be best to contact Apple directly to verify that. If Catalina doesn't have that ability, the photos are still in the old iPhoto Library, and can be extracted through a somewhat involved process.

-What version of OS X did you upgrade to Catalina from?
-Depending on the version of OS X you were running, and the versions of software you had installed, many of them could be incompatible or require an update/upgrade.

Feel free to list the most important applications you use and their version numbers, and we'll be happy to review. You can also get some compatibility information from RoaringApps.

C

 

[AndreaM]

Thanks for your reply Cory. I wasn't aware that there was a replacement for iPhoto so I looked for the Photos app that you mention and found it. However, when I open it there are no photos so I guess I'll have to import them from the old iPhoto library, if someone can tell me how to go about it.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

Macworld posted this: iPhoto users, you’re out of time with macOS Catalina. What’s your next step?

• Launch Photos in Catalina. Photos can still read and upgrade an iPhoto library, as it doesn’t require launching iPhoto. Photos doesn’t copy the iPhoto images, but it uses a special kind of link that lets the same file exist in two places, avoiding increasing your storage requirements.

See if that works for you and let us know.

C

 

[AndreaM]

Well, I looked around in Library and couldn’t access iPhoto Library there either. However, when just trying anything I could think of, I looked in Pictures and there was the iPhoto library, so I opened that and it automatically imported them into the new Photos library! I’m fair chuffed and should be able to safely remove iPhoto from my Mac. Thank you for pointing me in the right connection. I wasn’t expecting this outcome to be as simple as it turned out to be.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Excellent!

You can remove the iPhoto application, but I believe that article states that Photos links to the iPhoto Library, so I wouldn't delete that.

C

 

[AndreaM]

Okay, I’ll leave the original library where it is.