Frustrations!

I got a new MacBook Air last week.  I went through the migration from my 11 year old MacBook Pro and everything migrated or so I thought.

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I went looking for my photos and ended up in a loop telling me the photos were in iCloud except when I tried to open them there I was told I needed to move them to a folder.  Eventually I got some photos but they were only the ones that I had on my phone not the thousands I had on my old laptop.  

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I've been struggling trying to get them out but to no avail.  Today Dan suggested we google how to move photos from one Mac to another.  The AI suggestion was to do the migration again but select only the photos.

Well ... we started that.  It was difficult to find where the photos were.  We thought we had them but then the connection between the two computers was lost despite having done this migration before this way ... no cables.  We chose Cancel Migration.

When I finally was able to open my new computer, it was as though I was starting all over again. And I was because all the files, bookmarks, apps I had migrated before were no longer in place.  There was a long list of all my documents but not in the folders or places on the desktop.  Argg!  And no new photos had transferred.

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So here's what I'm facing.  Doing the total migration again and hoping it worked like it did the very first time.  

Plus I need to do a photo purge then use airdrop to move photos that I want to keep on my new laptop.  That's the hardest part of all.  Many of the photos are in photo books so why do I need them on the laptop? I don't know.

What would you do?