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How to move photo library to a different user account

I have a user account on my iMac that is having major issues. I created a new on and am migrating everything to it before I delete it. Now I need to move the Photo Library to the new user account.


Rather than exporting all 5000-plus photos then importing them to the new user, and loosing all the associated data such as albums, faces, names, and wherever else, I would like to import the entire library and retain all this data, as if I were migrating to a new machine.


How do I do that?


There are two files of the Kind "Photos Library" in my Users/Pictures folder. One is very small (about 240MBytes) and the other is large and is over 16GBytes.


I tried importing the larger file and Photos tells me that it cannot be imported because "...it may be an unrecognizable file format or the file may not contain valid data."


It is possible that this file is a legacy item from when I used iPhoto or it could just be corrupted. When I import the smaller file there are only a handful of photos, not the 5000+ that should be there.


I DO NOT store the photos on the iCloud. Not enough room there. Even if I decided to start now, with the issues there are with this account, it probably would fail.


My Mac is running MacOS 12.6.

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Oct 20, 2022 11:21 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 20, 2022 3:33 PM

Do you have an external drive that can hold your library and is formatted either mac OS X Extended (journaled) or APFS?


If so copy the library to it, boot into your other account and copy it back into your Pictures folder. Or you could leave it on the external drive and run it from there, clearing up space on your boot drive for other files.


In any case do not delete the original library until you've opened it up i the new account and verified that all photos are present and it works as intended.


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 20, 2022 3:33 PM in response to TBade

Do you have an external drive that can hold your library and is formatted either mac OS X Extended (journaled) or APFS?


If so copy the library to it, boot into your other account and copy it back into your Pictures folder. Or you could leave it on the external drive and run it from there, clearing up space on your boot drive for other files.


In any case do not delete the original library until you've opened it up i the new account and verified that all photos are present and it works as intended.


How to move photo library to a different user account

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