iPhoto Library Duplication, Moving to other Systems

Scott Rose offers a detailed explanation and procedure for the problematic process of moving iPhoto libraries to a different Mac, with the help of a utility called SNAX:

"You can't simply copy the entire iPhoto Library from one machine to another, because the operating system will prevent you from copying, due to the fact that there are invisible files hidden in the iPhoto Library folder.

"This is a real problem if you're switching machines, and you need all of your photos/albums/custom books intact. In our case, we couldn't just re-create our albums from scratch because we had 2,000 images divided into 25 different albums... each album had hundreds of images in it, and we had custom books too! It would have taken weeks to piece everything back together.

"The problem is that there are tons of invisible files inside the 'iPhoto Library' folder, and Mac OS X won't just let you copy over the invisible files. But without those invisible files, you can't have all your photo albums, all your images, and all your books transferred over intact.

"This is a big problem, and it is not documented anywhere by Apple either.

"Without diving into UNIX, the way that we were able to copy the entire iPhoto Library folder was to use a wonderful utility called 'SNAX', which let us copy the entire folder (invisible files and all) from one computer to the next.

"To do this in SNAX, you have to:

• (a) 'show invisibles', and then
• (b) copy within the program's browser interface (i.e. don't drag outside of the program to copy)."

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