 I put this screencast together to show you how you might be able to open older iPhoto libraries with Apple's new photo app and then export the photos from that to a separate folder which you can then re-import back into the photos app. Problem is if you have multiple iPhoto libraries there isn't an easy way to actually consolidate those libraries together unless you use third party tools. Also I just want to make sure I understand how you've exported those photos or stored those photos on the various external hard disks. I'm assuming that what you've got is separate iPhoto libraries rather than a folder full of images. So this is a folder I've created with four Canon RAW image files. I'll talk more about different file types in a second but I'll show you how you can actually bring both types in. So let's open up the photos app. Database at the moment is empty and the first thing I'm going to do is to import those four photo files. So from file import browse to where those files are. Then select them all and click review for import. Import all new photos. And so that's now started our photo library. You might already have an Apple photo library with some photos in which would be your starting point. I just wanted to create a starting point here. And the other reason I did this is I just want to explain very briefly the choices that you have after you've converted a iPhoto library. In terms of exporting you can either export them as originals or you can export the edited version. So to just show you the difference on that very quickly there's one photo here which I'm just going to do a very quick edit. And I'm just going to do a crop. So you can see what I've done. Go back to look at the whole library there so you can now see that image is cropped. So I'm going to export it twice once as the original which is the raw image file that's come straight off the camera. And then I'll export the edited version as well. So let's do the original first. So file export unmodified original. Export and I just put that on the desktop. So you can see here that that's the original image rather than the edited version. And then I'm going to do the same thing but export the edited version. This is where you can choose the file format. I guess the most common file format that most photos use is JPEG which is a compressed format which means you're losing some information. There's an algorithm basically that looks at the information it thinks is safe to lose that the eye can't really see but you are losing some data. There are differences in formats. TIFF is actually a lossless format but creates a significantly larger file size and PNG is about halfway house. It's not as good as a TIFF but doesn't create as larger file sizes. So it's a sort of a compromise but JPEG tends to be a fairly common standard for compressed photos certainly. So we'll just export that out into the same place. And what I'm going to do I'm just going to for the sake of this just change the name very quickly. So that's the original and that one is the edited version. I'm going to re-import those back and this is similar to how you would actually import those photos that you've exported from a converted iFotos library. So you can see here the difference. So that's the original exported as an original which is obviously the original file and then that's the edited version. I guess the key thing here is is what is the file format of the original photos that you're storing. If from the camera they're just been exported as JPEGs and stored in the iFotos library as JPEGs then it's probably just as easy to choose the exporter's edited version so you don't lose all your edits. If you do have raw files and you want to retain all the extra data that a raw photo file has you might want to then have a think about what you want to do. Anyway, so that's showing you how to import photos into the photos app from a folder of images. We're now going to look at actually opening and converting an iFotos library. So I'm just going to shut down photos. So as you're opening photos press the Alt key down then if you don't see the library listed here click on the other library button and click Open. It will then update that library and convert it into the new photos format. So we'll just wait for that to complete so that the import has now been completed and what we'll need to then do is export all those photos out again so we can re-import them into our original photos library. To do that you can actually select all the photos under Edit, Select All. However, for this demonstration I'm just going to select a few just to show you the principle. And then as I showed you in the earlier part of the screencast file export and you can then choose to export the modified version if you've made any edits or you can export the original photos. So I'm going to choose the original photos here export and what I'm going to do I'm just going to put those into a new folder. So photo exports, there we go, export originals. That's done. So now what we've done we've opened our old iPhoto library in the Photos app. We've then exported all of those photos out into a folder. So again we can close photos down, open photos back up with the Alt key pressed down so we can re-select our main library which is this one here. And then we can file import all the files that we just exported. So go back to import all new photos. There we go. So obviously that was just using a few of those images and by repeating that process by opening and converting your iPhoto libraries exporting those photos out into a folder then re-importing them back into your main photos library you'll be able to consolidate all your photos in one place. I wouldn't worry too much about duplicates. There are tools that will help you sub-illuminate duplicates. Again third-party tools not necessarily stuff that's provided within the Photos app itself. That might be the easiest way to approach it but I hope that screencast has been helpful. Alright, cheers.