Mac Forum / Country Specific / UK Mac Group / May 2008

As nobody else answered this I'll have a go at answering it, even though
I don't actually use iPhoto myself.

Drag the albums out of iPhoto so that they become simple JPG files in
folders named after the albums. Drag them into a fresh installation of
iPhoto on the new iMac. The album names will be taken from the folder
names on import.

You may lose other information, such as album date, tagging, etc, but
most of the actual photo information should be stored in the Exif data
of each JPG file. You will certainly lose the original JPGs for those
photos where you've use iPhoto to modify them, so you might wish to
"Revert to Original" on those photos where the original is more
important than the modified version.

As I don't use iPhoto myself, I cannot guess what else you might lose by
transferring the photos like this. I am not aware of an automatic way of
combining two iPhoto libraries that preserves all the metadata iPhoto
stores.

iphoto library manager:
<http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/>

The only catch I ran into is it won't merge book and other print
projects.