How To Export Photo Library To External Hard Drive Mac
Knowing how to move photos library to external hard drive is important for your editing flow. It saves valuable desktop space and scratch disk memory on your computer. On top of this, using an external hard drive provides other benefits. 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. Dec 04, 2015 What are the step by step instructions for moving the new Photos Library to an external hard drive in able to free up space on my MacBook's drive? I am about to move the Photos Library to an external drive and have the same exact question in mind. If my system Photo library is on an external and I copy it over to my internal drive. Dec 11, 2018 Luckily, it’s easy enough to copy your Mac’s Photos library to an external drive. This guide assumes you’re using the actual “Photos” app on your Mac, the default if you’ve used iCloud Photo Stream or imported from your iPhone. Nov 09, 2018 Free up your space by transferring your Photos library to another external hard drive. By freeing up space you will have valuable space for your work on your Mac. In addition to this, we will help you to back up your whole photo library to iCloud. Why store photos on external drive In today’s world,.
Apr 04, 2020 Select iCloud Photo Library to turn iCloud back on for your Photos. Disconnect your external hard drive and verify that all of your photos are indeed in the Photo library on the device. Once you are certain that the process is completed, you can drag the Photo library on your Mac to the Trash. Tip: If you’re signed in with your Apple ID and have iCloud Drive turned on, you can export photo files to iCloud Drive, then access them from any Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Windows PC set up to use iCloud Drive.See Use iCloud Drive to store documents.
Export Photo Library Mac To 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 Photo Library and use Optimize Mac Storage, or move your library to an external drive.
Icloud photo library download to mac. Select Photos Preferences and, in the General tab, click Use as System Photo Library. In the iCloud tab, make sure iCloud Photo Library is enabled. It may not be, because you switched libraries.
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
How To Export Photos Mac To External Hard Drive
- 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. 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.