Mac Photos Library On External Hard Drive
Your Photos library holds all your photos, albums, slideshows and print projects. If your library is large, and you want to free up storage space on your Mac, turn on iCloud Library and use Optimise Mac Storage, or move your photo library to an external drive.
Before you start, make sure that you back up your library.
Mac Photo Library On External Hard Drive
Oct 25, 2019 How to add pictures and videos to albums. Launch Photos on your Mac. Click on Photos in the sidebar, under the Library section. Pick out the photos you want to add to an album, either new or existing. Hold down the command key on your Mac and click to select multiple photos. Right-click on your. How to transfer your iPhone or Mac Photo library to an external drive. By AppleInsider Staff Wednesday, January 31, 2018, 04:40 pm PT (07:40 pm ET) Storing an entire collection of photographs in.
To import photos from your hard drive to iPhoto, choose File - Import To Library. The process will appear the same as always, with one important exception: instead of copying the original file to the iPhoto Library database, iPhoto will create an alias for each photo. Right click on the Photos library icon and select Get Info. Verify that you have enough free space for the library on the external drive. Drag and drop the Photos library icon onto the hard drive icon either in Finder or on your Desktop. Wait for the copy to complete. Sep 15, 2018 I have an external hard drive where I moved all of my mac photos to. I now have a PC with windows 10, but I can't find a way to save the photos onto my computer. The hard drive is recognized in disk management, but does not appear under devices. I would like to format it to my PC WITHOUT losing my photos.
Prepare your drive
You can store your library on an external storage device, such as a USB or Thunderbolt drive formatted as APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled).1 Find out how to check the format of your external storage device.
To prevent data loss, Apple doesn't recommend storing photo libraries on external storage devices like SD cards and USB flash drives, or drives that are shared on a network.
Move your Photos library to an external storage device
- Quit Photos.
- In the Finder, go to the external drive where you want to store your library.
- In another Finder window, find your library. The default location is Users > [username] > Pictures, and it's named Photos Library.
- Drag your library to its new location on the external drive. If you see an error, select your external drive's icon in the Finder, then choose File > Get Info. If the information under Sharing & Permissions isn't visible, click , then make sure that the 'Ignore ownership on this volume' checkbox is selected. If it's not selected, click to unlock it, enter an administrator name and password, then select the checkbox.2
- After the move is finished, double-click Photos Library in its new location to open it.
- If you use iCloud Photo Library, designate this library as the System Photo Library.
Delete original library to save space
After you open your library from its new location and make sure that it works as expected, you can delete the library from its original location.
In a Finder window, go back to your Pictures folder (or whichever folder you copied your library from) and move Photos Library to the trash. Then choose Finder > Empty Trash to delete the library and reclaim disc space.
Mac Photos Library On External Hard Drive 500 Gb
Open another Photos library
If you have multiple libraries, you can open a different one like this:
- Quit Photos.
- Press and hold the Option key while you open Photos.
- Select the library that you want to open, then click Choose Library.
Photos uses this library until you open a different one.
Learn more
If you have a permissions issue with your library, you might be able to resolve the issue by using the Photos library repair tool.
1. You can't move your library to a disc that's used for Time Machine backups.
2. If the volume isn't formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or has been used for Time Machine backups but hasn't been deleted, this checkbox will either not be present or won't be selectable after unlocking. Delete and reformat the drive for this option to be available.
Apple photos library external drive. (And as good as iCloud has become, your photos and video are precious enough that they're worth keeping backed up in multiple places.). There is an alternative: Moving your Photos library to an external drive (or creating an entirely separate library and syncing it with iCloud). Here's how to do it, and some reasons why you should — and shouldn't! Apple's photo management software for the Mac, has grown to be a fairly competent all-purpose storage locker. But as your photo and video library grows — and especially if you've taken advantage of — you may find that your Photos library strains to fit on your Mac's hard drive.While there are options to keep your Mac from running out of space, like if you use iCloud Photo Library, it comes at a cost: Without a fully-stored Photos library, you won't be able to create secondary.
May 31, 2018 I made a backup of my iPhoto Library. Now, I want to open my backup iPhoto Library on Microsoft computer. I have used both Windows and Linux to read many different iPhoto libraries and restore all of the photos that they contained, and save them to other places. For most people a better solution is to have iCloud Photo Library enabled. How to restore photo library on mac. Note: If you use iCloud Photos and you restore the System Photo Library from a Time Machine backup, any photos you’ve deleted since the last Time Machine backup are restored to your Mac and uploaded to iCloud again.If you chose to optimize Mac storage, Time Machine may not have a backup of your originals. However, the originals are stored in iCloud.