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craig1410

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 22, 2007
1,129
905
Scotland
Hi,
I’ve just bought a new MacBook Pro 16” and am busy setting it up. I have a 2016 MBP and want to transfer everything over from it. I’m aware of the Migration Assistant but have heard mixed reviews about it so have decided to just do the migration manually and only migrate what I actually need.

So, the question is about how best to migrate my iCloud Photo Library. It is about 250GB in size so it seems silly to just make my new machine download the entire library over my less than speedy internet connection. I’m aware that I can enable “optimise storage” but I want the full originals on my Mac. I can of course copy over the Photo Library from my Pictures folder on the old Mac to the new one but in the past I have found that this actually causes macOS to UPLOAD all the photos a second time and then de-duplicates them on the cloud end before causing further downloads to all my devices. I really don’t want to do that.

Does anyone know if a good way to go about this process? It just seems ridiculous to download everything from the cloud when I have a full copy of all the photos sitting right beside me. Especially as I live in a rural location and my main broadband is delivered over 4G cellular. Maybe I should just go visit my local Apple store and make use of their WiFi! :)

Thanks,
Craig.
 
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