Combining Mac and iphone photos

MosLens wrote: … What is the best way to access all photos in one place ?

iCloud Photos.

First, if you're not sure about all your pictures, you can use the Mac Finder's File>New Smart Folder to collect all the pictures. I did a search for files with a "." (that would be all of them) and "Kind is image."

Then sort them by size, because many of the pictures you'll get are small useless things from apps. The path to a selected picture is shown at the bottom, so you can find the folders they're in. You should back these up to an external drive!

Then drag them to Photos. Be sure you have room! Because copies of these pictures will be stored in the Photos Library, but they will still be in their original spots. When you import pictures to Photos, it will help out by checking for duplicates. After you've backed them up and made sure, you can trash them and just use Photos to view them.

And you can use Photos to organize them! Since Photos has Smart Albums, you can collect pictures together way more easily than on a phone. And using iCloud Photos, Mac Photos will automatically grab all the pictures on your phone, and they will get organized as well.

All the pictures in Mac Photos will be mirrored on the phone, and you can use "Optimize Storage" on the phone so you can fit more pictures in.

Since your Mac is a desktop, you can easily use an external hard drive to hold your Photos Library, so there's not storage problem on the Mac. See this:

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

Let us know what you think…

Photos imports the metadata with the picture. It doesn't display all metadata, but if you export the picture to a separate file, like for backup or to send to someone, you find that all the metadata is still there. Photos itself shows created date, location, camera model, shutter speed, ISO, aperture, Lens name, focal length, file name, title, caption, keywords, and some other stuff.

If you have pictures organized with folders in Mac's Finder, you can import them keeping them in separate albums with the Finder Folder names. You can put similar albums into folders, to keep those together. All that organization will copy to a phone through iCloud.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "including those in photo libraries." Do you have multiple Photos Libraries? Getting pictures from one Library to another might involve some choices. You can certainly use Photos' menu "File>Import" to import pictures from other Photos Libraries, but you lose the albums and folders. If you've put lots of effort into organizing a Photos Library with albums and folders, then you may need the help of an additional app.

Macs can use multiple Photos Libraries-- you just double click on the one you want to use. But only one of them, the System Library, can connect to iCloud. For instance, I have a "Favorites" Library that is the one I sync to my phone and iPad, rather than transferring all pictures to those devices.

Let us know how it goes…