What versions of Photos and Pages come with the 2024 iMac?

Your concern is very valid — moving from a 2013 iMac to a 2024 iMac with macOS Sequoia will be a big leap, not so much for the OS itself, but for the app versions and file formats involved. The good news is that both Photos and Pages are designed to migrate your existing libraries and documents forward, but there are a few things you should prepare for to ensure you don’t lose a single image or formatting detail.

For Photos

Your existing Photos (or iPhoto, if you haven’t upgraded that library yet) library will need to be converted when opened on the new iMac. This is handled automatically by Photos on first launch, but the conversion process can take a while with 65,000+ images. As long as you copy the entire Photos Library package from your old iMac to the new one before opening it, all metadata (albums, edits, keywords, etc.) should remain intact. I highly recommend making a full Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner backup of your old iMac before you start — that way, if the migration hiccups, you still have your untouched original library.

For Pages

Documents made in older versions of Pages will open in the latest version, but if they’re very old (Pages '09 or earlier), certain formatting elements might shift slightly because Apple has changed the underlying file architecture over the years. Most text and images come across fine, but complex layouts — especially newsletter-style designs — should be reviewed after migration. If you want a bulletproof fallback, export your most important projects to PDF from the old iMac before moving them. This ensures you’ll always have an exact replica, even if the editable version changes.

Step 4 - Move data (Migration Assistant is safest)

1. On the new iMac’s first-run (or later via /Applications/Utilities/Migration Assistant), choose to migrate from your old Mac or from your Time Machine backup. Include Users, Applications, and Documents. This will bring your Photos library and Pages documents over intact with permissions and metadata preserved.
2. If you prefer manual copy: copy the entire .photoslibrary package (don’t go inside it) to the new Mac’s internal drive (ideal) or to a compliant external. Also copy your Documents, including your .pages projects and font files.

Step 5 - First open of Photos on the new iMac (the “upgrade”)

1. Hold the Option key while launching Photos and choose the copied library. Photos will upgrade the library; with 65k assets this can take a while, so just let it finish uninterrupted.
2. After it opens, verify: in All Photos check the item count matches the old Mac, spot-check Albums, Keywords, Edits, and a few RAW+JPEG pairs if you use them. People/face recognition will re-index and improve over time—don’t worry if it looks incomplete day one.
3. If you use iCloud Photos, go to Photos > Settings > iCloud and make this the System Photo Library first, then enable iCloud Photos. Choose Download Originals on the new Mac if you want a full local master.

Step 6 - Validate Pages on the new iMac

1. Install your custom fonts (Font Book). Open your key Pages projects and do a quick style pass: headers/footers, section breaks, image anchors, table of contents, and page counts.
2. Compare each against your PDF exports from step 8. If anything shifted, tweak styles or text wraps once, then save—future opens should be stable. Keep the PDFs as your “gold master” archives.

Step 7 - Edge cases & gotchas (so you don’t get bitten later)

1. If Photos says the library is on an unsupported volume (exFAT, network share, case-sensitive), move it to the internal disk or a properly formatted external and try again.
2. If you accidentally open a different library, quit Photos, relaunch with Option, and pick the correct one. Consider renaming the real one to something unambiguous like Photos Library – MASTER.photoslibrary.
3. If you had Shared Albums or multiple Apple Accounts, confirm the same iCloud account is active before enabling iCloud Photos on the new Mac to avoid duplicates.
4. Keep the 2013 iMac offline (Wi-Fi off) until you’ve verified counts and formatting on the new machine—this prevents any unexpected iCloud sync churn.

Step 8 - Finalize and decommission

1. After a few days of use on the new iMac, run a fresh Time Machine backup there.
2. Only then consider wiping the old Mac. I like to archive the old Photos library and “final PDFs” of critical Pages documents to an external drive that goes on a shelf.
3. You can then decide to keep your 2013 Mac as a "archive," or go through the process to get it ready for selling it, giving it away, or donating it. Apple covers that in this support article: What to do before you sell, give away, trade in, or recycle your Mac

Sorry, I know that's a lot of steps, but I prefer caution over being too hasty and losing data. You can also wait a bit to see if others here will chime in with their advice. (There are some really talented folks here, so don't be surprised if you get some additional advice ... or even a better way to do this.)

Ah, 80 years young!

Ok, great, let's see if I can assist you with getting this done. Again, I want to reiterate that you have the option to have Apple do this for you. Of course, you would need to be near either an Apple Store or an Apple Authorized Service Provider as this is one of the services they provide when you purchase a new Apple computer.

The other option, which I will go into some detail, is the "Do It Yourself (DIY)" method. Regardless of which you choose, it is critical that you have a recent backup of your current 2013 Mac. My major goal for you is not to lose any critical photos/pages documents, through the migration process. In addition, we will consider your 2013 Mac as the "final" backup should something go amiss.

The following are my recommended steps to do a DIY migration:

Step 1 - Pre-flight (15–30 min of checks)

1. On the 2013 iMac, open Photos > Preferences > General and note the Library Location. Confirm you’re using a single .photoslibrary (not multiple).
2. If you ever used iPhoto/Aperture, verify you only have one “master” library. If your Photos library was created from iPhoto, that’s fine—just don’t mix libraries during the move.
3. In Photos > Preferences > iCloud, if you use iCloud Photos set Download Originals to this Mac and let it fully complete (no “Updating…” in the window).
4. In Photos, run File > Consolidate (if available) so referenced images are pulled into the library package.
5. Quit Photos, then repair the library: hold Option+Command while launching Photos and run the repair tool. Let it finish cleanly.

Step 2 - Make two backups (non-negotiable)

1. Create a fresh Time Machine backup.
2. Create a secondary clone (Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper). If your Photos library is on an external drive, ensure the drive is APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), non–case-sensitive, and in Get Info check Ignore ownership on this volume.
3. Snapshot your key Pages docs: in Pages, export your most important files to PDF (Best) for a permanent visual reference. Keep the editable .pages files too.

Step 3 - Prep Pages documents (avoid font/layout surprises)

1. On the 2013 iMac, open a representative sample of your older projects (especially anything created in Pages ’09) in the current Pages available there, and Save so they’re in the modern format.
2. In each project, jot down any custom fonts you used. Collect those font files and be ready to install them on the new iMac via Font Book (double-click to install). Embedded images are typically stored inside the .pages package, but if you ever linked assets, gather those too.

A 2024 model can run the newest macOS which can run the newest bundled software versions. I would only be concerned if you were upgrading from a 2013 iMac to, say, a 2016 iMac. You could run a newer version of software but still not the newest, and would still be behind.

If your grandchildren are using older versions of Pages then they may well find that if you save them with the newest version they will not be able to open them. I don't use Pages but most applications let you save to a variety of formats and it may be there is an option to save to an older Pages. Alternatively maybe something transitional such as a Word format. If it comes down to it, print to PDF and send them that.

You don't mention Music. I know the Sequoia version of Music utterly failed at importing my old iTunes library. I had to add my music files to it again and manually rebuild all my playlists and ratings. I think there was only a single version of iTunes which transitioned to a single version of Music back in the Catalina days. Try it with anything older and newer and it fails 100%.

If you like, I can provide you with a suggested "step-by-step" on migrating your Photos and Pages documents so you can see what you can expect going through the process doing so. The key would be to fully verify that your photos and documents are successfully transferred before deciding on what to do with your older Mac.

Limnos wrote:

You don't mention Music. I know the Sequoia version of Music utterly failed at importing my old iTunes library. I had to add my music files to it again and manually rebuild all my playlists and ratings. I think there was only a single version of iTunes which transitioned to a single version of Music back in the Catalina days. Try it with anything older and newer and it fails 100%.

If you have a large iTunes Library, having Music do a recursive Import from the top-level folder may seem to work, at first, but leave you with a Music library with huge holes in it. I ran into that when moving from an old Mac which ran High Sierra and iTunes to a Mac that was running Ventura and Music.

Since I kept a copy of my iTunes Library around after the initial import, I was able to go back and do many smaller imports to bring in the albums that were missing.

The symptoms suggest that when you Import a folder, Music essentially builds a list of all subfolders that contain music, and then imports songs from them one by one. If the list is very big, it apparently causes a silent overflow of some data structure which effectively truncates the list, resulting in the holes in the subsequent import.

You might give the following some consideration: a 10 Core Mac Mini M4 with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD ($999 US + tax) with a 27" LG 4k monitor ($250 US + tax from Amazon.com)  is $1249 US + tax which is $560 less than a similarly configured new 24" iMac ($1799 + tax)  re 07/2025.   

I just got a new Mac Mini M4 with a 32" LG 4K monitor w/speakers for about $480 less than a new M4 iMac. It is really an excellent value.

Just some food for thought.

Islandgrandma wrote:

A couple of notes - in case it makes a difference in any of your instructions - I do not use iCloud for my photos (or for anything else, for that matter). Everything is either on my iMac or a "My Passport for Mac" external hard drive. I have 3 of those - one for Time Machine and the other two for duplicate backups - just in case! (You can see I'm paranoid about losing my pictures!)

No problem, you can just skip any step that referenced iCloud. I wasn't sure and just wanted to cover all the bases in case you did.

The other thing is my Pages is version 8.1 (6369). I couldn't find where it told me what year that came out.

From my notes, Pages 8.1 (build 6369) was released on July 9, 2019. That was part of the iWork suite update for macOS, which included some refinements for collaboration features, table styles, and better integration with iCloud Drive.

Tesserax wrote:

Ah, 80 years young!

Oh to be 80 again. 👴