Migrating Lightroom photos to Photos with folder structure and metadata intact

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Paddy55 Author

Level 1

8 points

Migrating Lightroom photos to Photos with folder structure and metadata intact

I'm wanting to migrate all the Photos (DNG, TIFF and JPG) and Videos from Lightroom to Photos.

I have so few edits I don't need to migrate these.

However I do want to retain the folder structure and all metadata (esp GPS).

Haven't seem anything posted on this for a couple of years at least so I expect the advice might have changed.

I am very interested in any Utilities, Apps, Plug-ins.

Thanks in advance

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Migrating from Lightroom to Photos

MacBook Air 15″, macOS 15.6

Posted on Aug 13, 2025 06:09 PM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

165,516 points

Aug 14, 2025 12:16 AM in response to Paddy55

Two ways to approach this:

Make sure you write all the metadata to the photo files in Lightroom - check the manual for this.
Export the images, including the metadata to folders in the Finder- that's how you preserve your structure.
Import these folders to Photos.

or

Check out Avalanche:

https://cyme.io/products/avalanche/apple-photos/

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Answer 2

Aug 14, 2025 07:53 AM in response to Yer_Man

Yer_Man wrote: …Check out Avalanche:

https://cyme.io/products/avalanche/apple-photos/

That looks interesting.

Directly Importing from Finder Folders into Photos works, but you do somehow end up with more folders than you started with. For instance, if I import a folder and check

"Keep Folder Organization," I get the pictures in an album, and the album inside a folder. So afterward I have to remove the extra folders. It's not much, but there is some work afterward cleaning things up a bit.

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Answer 3

Yer_Man

Level 10

165,516 points

Aug 14, 2025 11:29 PM in response to Richard.Taylor

I've not used Avalanche myself, but I have seen good reports on it.

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