Multiple iPhoto Libraries

Just discovered a cool feature of iPhoto (’08) that I did not know about. It can handle multiple iPhoto libraries.

Due to serious color-related limitations on the display of my wifes laptop, she currently imports her pictures onto my Mac. In addition, my oldest child is taking more and more pictures with her camera, all of which also goes onto my Mac. To avoid “polluting” my own iPhoto library, I wanted to create and manage separate libraries.

It turns out, that if you hold down the Option-key (Alt-key) while starting iPhoto, it will popup a dialog with the options to either create a new library or choose an existing one.

Nice!

August 15, 2009 В· polesen В· 3 Comments
Tags: , ,  В· Posted in: Photography, Tools

3 Responses

  1. Paulo - February 23, 2010

    I was going to try ‘iPhoto Library Manager’, but this was the only feature I wanted.
    You need to close and reopen iphoto (holding the Option-key (Alt-key)) to switch between libraries.

    Thanx for the tip

  2. will - August 20, 2011

    if you accidentally created multiple libraries, can you merge them back together? I have two sets of pictures in two libraries taking up a lot of space and I want to consolidate.

  3. polesen - August 20, 2011

    I don’t think there is an easy way, except exporting and importing. But I guess that will make you loose some of the metadata :-( I think stuff like “Albums” are a pure internal thing of iphoto, so I think that will be lost when exporting. The “Events” I think are determined from catalogue names, so maybe they are kept. Tags need to have been written into the actual photos, to not disappear.

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