Organising photos and transferring them to a MacBook Pro

First let's try to minimize the problem on the iMac:

Have you run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up" or anti-virus apps on your iMac?

Are you still running iPhoto on your iMac? If you are do the following;

1 - launch iPhoto with the Option+Command keys held down

and Repair Permissions.

2 - repeat #1 but this time Rebuild Database.

Download and run Etrecheck. Etrecheck is a diagnostic tool that was developed by one of the most respected users here in the ASC and recommended by Apple Support  to provide a snapshot of the system and help identify the more obvious culprits that can adversely affect a Mac's performance.

Copy the report

and use the Add Text button to include the report in your reply. How to use the Add Text Feature When Posting Large Amounts of Text, i.e. an Etrecheck Report

IMPORTANT:

Before running Etrecheck assign Full Disk Access to Etrecheck in the Etrecheck's Privacy preference pane so that it can get additional information from the Console and log files for the report:

Also click and read the About info to further permit full disk access.

Then we can examine the report and see if we can determine what might be causing the problem.

One thing I did forget to say. You should also create a smart album with the search criteria 'Photos is referenced'. Hopefully the album will be blank as this will mean that all of your photos are actually contained in the Photos library. If there are photos in the album however, it means they are being stored outside of the library so you should locate them and reimport them.

Once you have tidied everything up, if not before, don't forget BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!!

It all depends quite how jumbled they are!!

When you say they are in a mess, are they currently stored within the Photos app but not sorted within albums? Or are they in multiple folders within the Pictures folder or in multiple folders across your entire hard disk or are they scattered within multiple emails.

For the photos you want to delete, is it because they are duplicates, or poor resolution or taken within a certain date range?

Depending on exactly what you are trying to do, will determine which tool/ approach is going to help you.

You are welcome - don't worry, between myself and other more knowledgeable people on this forum we will give you plenty of help.

The first thing to do is to go into the menubar at the top of Photos and under the Photos drop down, select Preferences. Under the General tab, make sure that the importing line is ticked. This will make sure that the photos shown in the library have actually had the underlying file copied into the Photos application package - otherwise Photos will just reference the file.

It doesn't really matter if you tidy things up in your old Mac and then copy the library across to the new Mac or copy the 'messy' library and tidy up in your new Mac. If your current Mac is very slow you might find it quicker to copy the library across and use the power of your new Mac to help speed up the tidying up process.

Just as a guide, how many photos do you have in your library?

Like any mammoth task, its best to take things one step at a time.

The concept of albums is a bit confusing and is different to how things were handed in iPhotos. Basically a single photo can appear in multiple albums so it may make sense to create some new albums based on the year the photo was taken. This is how I have my photos organised. You should then be able to make easier decisions on which photos to keep and which to delete. I'll send some more information and some useful links shortly.

I think Russ's idea of transferring to the new mac and organising there is a good one.

Some other things to think about. Do you really need to sort them out. If you get rid of all the folders/albums, photos can still display the photos by year/month/day in the all photos view. For my older images, I don't have any more organisation than that. Bear in mind also that photos has a lot of automation to help you find images - such as face recognition, automatic folders for panoramas, selfies etc.

Something else you can use is the smart albums. I too have a lot of old scanned photos. I've used a smart album to help me identify them. I've used the search "Camera model is empty" - because scans have not been taken with a camera, there is no camera model. It does also find screen shots, so it is only a starting point, but narrows things down a lot. There are many other ways you can use smart albums to search for particular images.

Also worth considering using keywords in your images rather than organising with folders and albums. Why?

Well lets say I tag all my old family scans with the keyword OldFamilyScan - I can then find them using the keyword rather than an album. OK - not much different than using album called "OldFamilyScan"

The power really comes though when you use multiple keywords. So lets say I add the keyword NT for all photos taken at a national trust property. But also add they keyword of the place - say BiddulphGrange or DunhamMassey or TattonPark

So at some time in the future, I can search for all photos taken at a national trust place - or those taken at just some of the properties, or just one.Now lets say I tag photos taken on holiday with the word Holiday. Now if at some point in the future I say "now what was that NT place we went to on holiday last year" I can set up a smart album looking for NT, Holiday and Date last year.

They can also be combined with face recognition - so I want to find photos at Biddulph Grange with Dad in them - can do it.

So, depending on what you are ultimately looking to achieve, there are a couple of things you can do, you can tidy up your existing folder/album structure by renaming them and organising them and adding additional albums as needed. Folders are used to hold albums and albums are used to hold photos. So you can set up a structure depending on what makes sense to you.

However, I sense that what you need to do initially is clean up your entire library so you have a set of photos you want to keep.

Therefore, as Tony suggested, your best friend here is a series of Smart Albums, these are essentially search filters. You create them by going to menubar/file/create smart album. Photos will then filter your entire collection based on whatever search criteria you select.

I would then create a separate album for each year or month depending on how many photos you have - this will also help to identify any duplicates. For my library I have 4 smart albums for each year (Jan-March, etc). Once you have created these you'll need to systematically review each one, deleting unwanted photos, duplicates, etc. Once you have reviewed every smart album, you'll know that you have reviewed your entire library.

If you have the time and patience, Tony's suggestion of adding keywords is a good as it helps you to find photos later on.

This may be sufficient for your needs or you may then create additional new albums to cover a specific event like a birthday, holiday, etc. I create albums for each important event and then store them in folders by years.

Good luck!