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Merging libraries


PowerPhotos allows you to merge the contents of multiple libraries together into one, while preserving all your albums, moments, and photo metadata. To begin a merge, click the “Merge Libraries” toolbar button, or select “Merge Libraries” from the Library menu. This will present you with the following view for setting up your merge:

There are four main parts to setting up your merge

  1. Choose Source Libraries To specify one or more libraries whose contents you would like to merge into another library, drag the libraries from the library list on the left and drop them onto the area labelled “Choose Source Libraries”

  2. Choose Destination Library Then, you must specify what Photos library you want to receive all the photos and other content you’re merging. You can either drag one of your existing libraries to where it says “Drop destination library here”, or if you wish to start a brand new library instead, click the “Merge into a new, empty library” button. You will then be prompted to choose a name and location on your hard drive to store the new library. If you wish to change this location later, just click the “Change location” button to do so.

  3. Duplicate Handling When merging libraries, PowerPhotos provides an option to only import a single copy of any duplicate photos that occur multiple times among the libraries being merged together. If the “Eliminate duplicates while merging” checkbox is off, then all photos will be imported, regardless of whether they are duplicates. Similar to when using the Find Duplicates command, you can specify a list of criteria for PowerPhotos to use when deciding which photo from a group of duplicate photos should be kept. You can read more about how these criteria work in the duplicate rules chapter of the manual.

  4. Options

Once you have set up your merge, click the “Preview” button to advance to the preview screen, where you can see what the results of your merge will look like.

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