Mar 18, 2020 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 Photo Library and use Optimize Mac Storage, or move your library to an external drive. Before you start, be sure to. How to copy your Photos Library and keep its organization A reader wants to have a copy of his Photos Library on an external drive that looks like what he sees in the app. Jun 04, 2019 Copy photos to the external drive. Connect the external drive to your Mac. (You might need to plug the drive into a power source.) Open Photos on your Mac. On the menu bar at the top of your screen, select Edit Select all. Select File Export. In the pop-up window, set Subfolder Format to Moment Name, select your external drive from the. In addition to moving your multi-gigabyte iTunes library to an external drive, a significant amount of Mac storage space can be freed up by moving your photo libraries onto a separate drive. If you take a lot of pictures with a DSLR camera or your iOS devices and import them in Photos, you’ll fairly quickly run out of free space on most Macs.
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 Photo Library and use Optimize Mac Storage, or move your library to an external drive.
Before you start, be sure to back up your library.
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 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 disk space.
Open another Photos library
If you have multiple libraries, here's how to open a different one:
- 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 disk that's used for Time Machine backups.
2. Mac dyld library not loaded rpath libpython3.7m.dylib. If the volume isn't formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or has been used for Time Machine backups but hasn't been erased, this checkbox will either not be present, or won't be selectable after unlocking. Erase and reformat the drive for this option to be available. Lame library mac location.
When you use Photos You NEVER directly access the photos files
You can easily move your Photos library to a proper external drive which maintains everything exactly as it is - Where is it safe to store a Photos Library? Requirements for the external drive
Create new library mac photos. You can select the photos in Photos and export (file menu > export) to any finder folder including one on an EHD either as individual files or keeping the moments organization
You can use a user script to export your Photos albums to folders - Export Albums to Folders - Jacques Rioux's Script
And you are nearly a year behind with software updates and later this money will drop even further behind - the current software is Sierra 10.12.6 with Photos 2.0 and on 9/25 High Sierra - macOS High Sierra - Apple - with Photos 3.0 will be released - unless there is a good reason not to it would be best to update so you have the many bug fixes in the newer versions and the myriad of new features
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Copy Apple Photos To External Drive
Sep 18, 2017 9:31 AM