How To Move Your Mac Photos Library To An External Drive

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to move your Mac Photos library to an external drive. Now if you're running low on internal drive space on your Mac, one option you've got is to move your Photos library to an external drive. Now this is mainly an option for those of us that have desktops. That's iMacs, Mac Minis, Mac Studios and Mac Pros. It's a little more difficult if you've got a MacBook and you're moving it around because then in order to access your photos you're going to have to have that drive with you too. Well for desktop users it's a pretty good option since the drive can sit there behind your Mac and you could just forget it's there. It's just part of your system. Now for MacBook users and for those of us with desktops too, there's another option that's pretty easy if you need to clear off space. It requires you to use iCloud Photos which you probably are already using but you can use the Optimize function there. That'll save space on your local drive. So for instance here in Photos if I go to Photo Settings and then to iCloud here you can see I've got iCloud Photos turned on and the option that will save you space is Optimize Mac Storage. This means that all of your photos are saved to iCloud but only recently accessed ones and new ones are going to be cached locally. You can still access any of the photos you've got just that some of them may need to be loaded first. You may not even notice that happening if you've got a fast enough connection. But this could save you a lot of space. You could have say a large 10 gigabyte Photos library and with Optimize Mac Storage it may only use two or three gigs worth of space at any given time on your Mac. But let's say you'd rather have Download Originals to this Mac turned on so all of your photos are always local in addition to being in iCloud or you're really tight on space on your Mac and you really need to get this library onto another drive. So here's what you need to do. First you need to get an external drive. Now it has to be a real external hard drive. It can't be like an SD card in an SD card slot or a reader. It can't be a flash USB or a thumb drive a tiny little drive like that. Those just aren't going to be fast enough and they're not built to handle the constant read and write. It also can't be a network drive so it can't be a NAS or some other drive on your local network. And also of course shouldn't be stored on any other cloud storage system. You've got iCloud Photos if you want a cloud storage system and you should just use Optimize Mac Storage. But you shouldn't try to say put your Photos library on Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox or anything like that. And also I just want to make it clear you shouldn't be using your Time Machine drive for anything else except Time Machine. Don't put your Photos library on your Time Machine drive or anything else. For one that means you don't have a backup. Your original and your backup would be on the same drive. But also a Time Machine drive really needs to just be dedicated to Time Machine. So you're going to need a separate drive here. Now what you should get is an SSD a solid state drive. These are the faster drives that you can get today and you probably need that if you want to continue looking through your Photos at the speed that you're used to. If you really need a ton of extra space you can go with an HDD but those are much slower. Now the other thing you should know about this external drive is you need to format it correctly. You need to format it APFS. That's the modern Apple format for drives. It can be formatted Mac OS Extended journaled but there's no reason to format it like that. Use the more modern format. It definitely won't work if you format it for something else like for Windows. Also you want to check one more thing. I've got an external drive right here. If I control click it right click or two finger click on it and select get info. You want to look in the info window. At the very bottom you'll see ignore ownership on this volume. It should be checked. If it's not checked for some reason you're probably going to have to click this padlock here authenticate with your password and change that. If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 3,000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content course discounts and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash patreon. Now let's go back into the Photos app here. To begin the process you want to find your Photos library. In the Photos app go to photos settings and then look under general and you'll see library location and this tells you the location of the library. It's probably in your pictures folder which is indeed where mine is and it's probably named photos library dot photos library but it could be named something else. You can just click show in finder and it will open up a new finder window and take you right to it. Now there are two distinct situations here. In photos if you look under iCloud if you've got iCloud photos turned on and if you look under general and you see that use as system photo library is dimmed that means that this is your system library. You can only have one iCloud system library. You can have other libraries but they wouldn't be your one for iCloud photos. But if this is turned off then none of that matters. You're not using iCloud at all so system photo library wouldn't come into play here. Either way it shouldn't change how you actually move your photos library to your external drive. But I would recommend that you make sure that at the bottom of your library you see synced with iCloud and that it's complete. There are no pending photos to sync up or down. The other thing I would do at this point is consider that this is a very good time to back up your photos library. To archive it. Get yet another drive somewhere and actually save this entire photos library to it. Even if you're backing up with Time Machine and you're using iCloud photos it could be useful for instance for once a year or after you get back from a big trip with lots of new photos that you store a copy of your photos library and put it somewhere off-site away from where your Mac with your Time Machine backup are located. If you do that like I do then this is a great time to actually update that so you have an extra backup in case something goes wrong. Now to move this to an external drive all you need to do is just move it like any other file. So I'm going to create a new finder window here and since I've got those two windows open as the top two windows I'm going to split them so one's to the left and one is to the right like that. In this window I'm going to go to my external drive. So here it is. I'm going to take the photos library now and just drag it over there and it's just going to copy it over. So now I've got two copies of it. I have the original still untouched here in my pictures folder in my home folder on my internal drive and I've got the new version of it here on the external drive. Now if I just launched photos again right now it would just open this one up and ignore the copy I just made but instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to double click on the one on the external drive. This will open up the photos app and also tell it to use this library not the other one. So now everything looks kind of the same but if I go to photos settings here I could see the library location and it is indeed on my external drive. Also notice if I go to iCloud it says that's only for the system library. That's the one that's still in the pictures folder. So back here I see now I've got this So I can tell the app to use this one as my iCloud library. Now if you're not using iCloud photos you don't need this step. All you needed to do was to copy the library over and double click the new one to open that. But if you are using iCloud photos you need to click here. So now it's going to ask you to confirm here and it's warning you that the previous library the one that we checked to make sure that everything was in sync that if something wasn't in sync then it may not get to iCloud photos. In other words if before we did this it was in the middle of uploading say 10 new photos and only five got uploaded then switching the system photo library here means those other five will never get uploaded. But we confirmed that everything was in sync before so we're not worried about that. Then I'm going to click ok here and now we can see it's set as the system library and iCloud photos is now enabled. I can check it to complete turning it on and now it's going to sync this library with what was in iCloud and since the contents were identical anyway you could see it's already synced. So the final step is to go back to your pictures folder and get rid of the original knowing that the copy here is the new system library. Unless you're really short on space there's no rush to do that. You could do that tomorrow or next week giving you some time to use the photos app and make sure that everything seems fine. As I mentioned before this would have been a great time to archive this so you had yet another backup of it but if you're sure everything transferred over okay then you could just drag this to the trash. Now here are some troubleshooting tips. I showed you how you can double click on a photos library to open up the photos app with that library. Another way to do it is to quit photos and then hold the option key down and then launch photos. I'll do it here from the dock and then you get this little dialog here that's going to look for all the photos libraries that it can find on any of your drives and allow you to select one to open. This is also where you can create a new photos library. So you have another way to choose the exact library that you want and another set of modifiers you can use is to use option and command hold both of those down and then launch photos and then you get the repair library option. So you can click repair here and this is if you're having trouble. So if something isn't working quite right or getting error messages after switching libraries this is how you can do a repair to see if photos can fix it itself. Apple has this support page about this whole process so if you want to read this over before going through it you can and there's a few more details here as well. I do want to end by talking about my recommendations here and those are that if using a MacBook or any portable Mac that's not going to sit in the same spot all the time then use iCloud photos and use the optimize feature there to save space. But if using an iMac, a Mac Mini, a Mac Studio or a Mac Pro it's always going to be sitting in the same spot and it's no trouble having external drives attached to it then you can go ahead and do this if you really feel you're short on internal drive space. Although I prioritize my photos library so I want it to be an internal driver it's going to be as fast as possible but if your collection is just too big then putting on an external drive for a desktop setup is a decent idea just make sure the SSD you get is reliable and fast and also make sure is included in your time machine or online backup as well because often photos are the most valuable thing that we've got so you want to make sure it is backed up as much as possible. Hope you found this useful thanks for watching. Want to know about every new MacMost video each week? Sign up for the absolutely free MacMost email newsletter at macmost.com newsletter