Help migrating to photos

[scsjason]

The time, sadly, has come for me to move from iPhoto to photos. I have a collection of photos on my imac curated in an arrangement of my choice (year/event). I want to keep the originals locally on my new machine (when it arrives) but for them also to be available through the photos app on my other iDevices. I don't envisage editing them on anything other than the desktop machine.
It is unclear to me which of the myriad of options to select on photos such that I don't accidentally endup with all my photos vanishing in to icloud and being removed from my machine.
Can anyone offer any explanation of the options.

Ideally, if at all possible, if I should take photos with my iphone (which I rarely do) then they could automatically find there way to being on my desktop system? Or do I have to manually download them and effectively publish them back through the desktop photos app.

Any help understanding how photos / icloud works would be appreciated.

 

[RhetTbull]

What you've described is basically how iCloud works with Photos. Any photo taken or imported on any device linked to iCloud automatically appears on every other linked device. Edits, albums, keywords, etc. are all synced between devices. I believe the free iCloud subscription tier gives you 5GB storage for free. If you have more than 5GB in photos you'll need to pay for a higher tier. The pricing is reasonable. Bumping up to 50GB for example is $0.99/month in the US. See pricing here. To use iCloud, you need to ensure each device is logged in to your account then enable Photos syncing on each device. On the Mac, you go to Apple Menu > System Settings > Your iCloud User Name (AppleID) > iCloud > Photos and select Sync this Mac. On the iPhone, it's under Settings > Your iCloud User Name (AppleID) > iCloud > Photos.

Once you turn on iCloud Photos on all your devices, then all photos on all devices will sync to iCloud and to each other. If you have more photos than you have storage available on a device, you can enable "Optimize iPhone Storage" in the iCloud settings and this keeps only a preview copy of the image (which takes less space) on the device and keeps the original in the cloud. You can adjust this on each device. For example, I keep originals on my Mac but use the "Optimize Storage" on my iPhone.

You mentioned iPhoto which implies you're using a pretty old Mac. Be advised that on newer Macs, you may not be able to open that iPhoto library. It used to be that opening an iPhoto library on a Mac with the Photos app would convert the library to a Photos library, preserving all your edits and your metadata but I believe that as of macOS Ventura, Photos will no longer open an iPhoto library. If you find that to be the case, here are a couple of ideas:

1. If your old Mac can still sync to iCloud (not sure if iCloud still supports iPhoto) then the easiest way is to enable iCloud syncing on the old Mac and let all the photos sync then they will automatically sync to the new Mac once it's logged in to iCloud and syncing is enabled.
2. Use the PowerPhotos app to copy the photos from the iPhoto library to a new Photo library.
3. Export all the photos from iPhoto and then re-import them into Photos. You would lose your organization and metadata doing this. It can be done in a way that preserves all the organization and metadata using my free OSXPhotos tool but this is a "power users" tool and I'm assuming from your questions that using this tool might be beyond your comfort level.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Of course, while iCloud with Photos does fairly easily do what you (OP) want, you'll very likely overrun the 5GB free iCloud space and thus find yourself paying Apple forever rent for more iCloud space. If you don't want to be on that hook for the rest of your life, consider 2 other options:

1. Use home sharing to share photos managed on one Mac to all other devices on the same network (Macs, iDevices and AppleTVs). This will work great for you while you are at home but you won't have access to them when outside of the home network. However, you can sync select photos to iDevices easily enough to have access to them while away... or use a fraction of the Free iCloud space to sync only a select album(s) to iCloud for access while away from home too. I do exactly this with a "best of" photo album (best of all photos I have, which is about 700 photos) using a small portion of iCloud FREE space.

2. buy your OWN cloud solution like a Synology NAS and use their Photos app to manage your photos at home and away. The big difference here vs. iCloud is you are not paying forever rent. And Synology can do lots of other things that may be beneficial to you including supporting whole home Time Machine backups from all Macs.

In general, I'm anti-cloud (especially when forever rent is required), so I use Photos as I used iPhoto before it and iCloud existed... which means I have one main computer that manages the library & albums, use home sharing for sharing it around the home and use regular syncs to draw in new photos shot on iDevices AND synching select albums to iDevices to have access to a subset of all photos while away from home. I pay nothing in forever rent and also don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.

While I don't have the need for it, if you actually need anywhere access to EVERY photo in your "All photos" library available to you, I'd likely choose the #2 option and own my own cloud vs. forever renting space from any of the various cloud space providers, including iCloud. That will be one greater cost up front but that piece of tech can then do many other things for you too.