Photos library with FCPX

I have a fairly big Photos library (about 30k photos and 11k videos.

FCPX sees my Photos app (it is on an external drive), but it does not not load all of the pictures/videos.

My guess is that the Photos library is simply too big for FCPX to get its arms around to index all of the photos and videos and so only shows a very small amount of the.

Is that a valid assumption or what else could be the issue?

Thanks for help in advance!

richmont wrote: I have a fairly big Photos library (about 30k photos and 11k videos.

FCPX sees my Photos app (it is on an external drive), but it does not not load all of the pictures/videos.

My guess is that the Photos library is simply too big for FCPX to get its arms around to index all of the photos and videos and so only shows a very small amount of the...

I've never tried to access the library of the Mac Photos app from FCPX, but it's possible as shown in MacBreak Studio #392: www.rippletraining.com/articles/2017/03/...tos-final-cut-pro-x/

I assume you are browsing your 30,000 photos from within the Photos App UI within FCPX. In that UI there does not appear to be any filtering except favorites, and possibly a filename search. Even if it worked perfectly how would you find your desired photos among 30,000 with such limited filtering?

Once your desired photos are imported to FCPX you have more filtering and searching options. My first suggestion would be mark as favorite within Photos your best candidates then within FCPX filter on favorites. That can be done before the photos are imported.

Re not showing all your photos and clips, I'm not sure you're encountering a limit of FCPX itself. However I'm not sure which product (FCPX or Photos) has responsibility for populating the list when browsing media from the Photos library within FCPX.

I currently have 5,026 clips and 156 hr of material in a single library. It is 10.3 terabytes, including both 4k H264 media and proxies, and performance is pretty good on a top-spec 2017 iMac 27 and 32TB Thunderbolt RAID-0 array.

For our documentary work have shot over 1,000 raw stills per day, but our workflow for stills is mostly separate than video. This is because FCPX is not the ideal tool for processing thousands of raw stills, plus we don't want anything else in library. We convert and process the stills outside FCPX using Lightroom and Photoshop, then import about 1% of the best "keepers" to FCPX after rating/keywording of video content is well underway.

So FCPX itself might be able to handle 11,000 video clips and 30,000 JPEG photos in an internal FCPX library, but even this is toward the upper end of what people do and would require the fastest possible hardware. But it's another matter whether the UI and data interface between FCPX and Photos is designed for that. I somehow doubt this use case was a primary design goal.

Your easiest first step is try using favorites within Photos then filtering on favorites within the FCPX Photos interface (before importing to FCPX). If that doesn't work you'll have to select your picks within Photos, export them to a folder then import to FCPX. The same might apply for videos within your Photos library, but instead of exporting you could try to reveal them in Finder (if that's available) and move them to a separate folder for import to FCPX.

Another option is to create multiple Photos libraries. You could make a separate one for a project with just the photos you want to use. You can switch between the libraries several different ways. The only caveat is that FCPX can only see one of them - the one currently designated as the "System" Photos library. This can also be switched. easily though.

Thank you very much to both forum members that posted.

Just a quick update: I've discovered that indeed the FCPX interface is able to show all of my photos and videos. I can even see the groupings by Album etc.

Takes a while to load up, which I suspect is less an issue of FCPX itself, and more of 1) the photos library size being big, and 2) the fact it has to reach out to an external, not so fast, SSD drive (I got the rainbow wheel quite frequently even when not using FCPX when dealing with this Photo library).

But mainly just wanted to report that I answered my own question to some degree which was that it does seem FCPX can see , and load, the entire contents of the Photos library. Appreciate everyone's input!

Cheers!

One thing I would suggest would be to keep your videos out of the Photos library. The Macha sim for import videos into Photos is different fro importing into FCP. Many formats get wrapped when imported from a camera archive into FCP. The audio is also converted to a video standard sample rate in an incompressible format. None of this is done when videos files are imported into Photos or when subsequently brought into FCP. In some cases the metadata that’s in the camera archive structure is lost when importing into Photos first.

Since I recently bought Kyno, I no longer want to rely on any other way to backup, store and organize media, be it stills, video or audio. I went so far as making a clean install and consolidating all my media externally. Of course I still use Photos and iTunes to communicate with my iPhone, but that's the extend of it. Kyno directly sees and combs through proprietary folder structures (iTunes, Photos and FCP X's as well), shows exactly what's going on inside and doesn't mess up anything. Best of both worlds, as it lets you browse with ease AND keeps the process of media organization transparent.

Tom Wolsky wrote: In some cases the metadata that’s in the camera archive structure is lost when importing into Photos first.

Never ever would I rely on that app to securely store anything else but my iPhone travel pics.