You would think that moving images from the Apple Photos program on a Mac into Adobe Lightroom Classic would be easy. It turns out though that getting a copy of some, or all, of your images from the native Apple Photos program into Adobe Lightroom Classic is a complex process with lots of twists and secrets.
There are so many different ways to approach this process that I have divided this tutorial up into four distinct sections. In each section, I add in additional tricks and tips for each increasingly complex import scenario.
Things start out simple enough in the first section of this tutorial when my goal is just to bring over a copy of my favorite images from Apple Photos to Lightroom Classic. In section one, fortunately, all that I have to do is to export a full-resolution tif file from the Apple Photos and then import these new tif files into my Lightroom Catalog.
In the next section, I explain how to use the Export Unmodified Original command instead in Apple Photos if you want to create a copy of your pure original raw, or jpeg capture, that you can then import into Lightroom Classic.
Finally, I will teach you how to bring over a copy of all your original captures, plus full resolution copies of all of the images that you have ever worked on using Apple’s image management options, in the last part of this tutorial.
Unfortunately, none of the four options that I cover in this video tutorial include an efficient way to carry over some of Apple Photo’s best features like Favorites or Albums.
