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Copying albums and events


When keeping your photos separated in multiple libraries, you sometimes have the need to move a set of photos from one library to another. With iPhoto, the only way to do this is to export the photos from one library and then import them into another. However, in the process of doing this, you lose all the data you've worked to assign to your photos, such as titles, dates, keywords, faces, places, and ratings. iPhoto Library Manager provides a way to copy photos from one library to another without losing this valuable information.


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An album of photos can be copied from one library to another by dragging the album(s) you want to copy from the albums list in the main iPhoto Library Manager window and dropping them onto the library you would like to copy them to. iPhoto Library Manager will first collect the information about those photos from the source library, and then import those photos into the destination library and restore all the photo information as it was before. If a photo has been modified in the original library, then the original version of the photo will also be transferred to the destination library, so that the "Revert to original" command in iPhoto will work as expected. If you drag more than one album at once, and a photo belongs to more than one of those albums, the photo will only be imported once, but will be added to all the appropriate newly created albums in the destination library.


Note that you cannot drag albums from iPhoto itself into iPhoto Library Manager - you must drag the albums from iPhoto Library Manager's own window in order to perform a copy.


If you are running iPhoto 6 or later, you can also copy rolls/events betweeen libraries just like you can with albums. The small pop-up menu just above the album list will let you switch between viewing a library's albums and its rolls/events. After switching, you can select and drag the rolls/events you want to copy over to another library to copy them.


When copying albums, the photos in those albums will be imported as a series of rolls/events. In the preferences under the "Photo Copying" tab, you can choose to:



Some notes on what will and won't be copied when copying albums between libraries:



Unregistered users are limited to only copying albums/events totalling no more than 20 photos.