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How To Erase Photos From Photo Library Mac

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.

2020-4-5  Sometimes you may want to delete photos from your iPhone (for example, to free up space), but keep them in iCloud as a backup. But if your iCLoud Photo Library is enabled, you can’t do it: if you delete photos on your iPhone, they will be deleted from iCloud, too. The easiest way to deal with this is simply to turn off your iCloud Photo Library.

Before you start, be sure to back up your library.

  • How to transfer photos from Mac to external hard drive. If you decide not to use Time Machine, there’s a simple workaround for your iPhoto library. To move photos library to external hard drive, you just require a little drag-and-drop magic. How to backup photos on Mac.
  • 2020-3-31  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.
  • 2020-1-4  How to Delete Photos on a Mac Computer. This wikiHow teaches you how to delete photos on a Mac Computer. You can easily delete a photo by dragging it to the trash or you can use the Photos app on your Mac. After dragging a photo.
  • 2020-4-5  With the upgrade to Photos, many Mac users have been left with a duplicate iPhoto library on their Macs. Here’s how to delete iPhoto library and clear out some clutter. IPhoto used to be the standard photo editor and photo.
  • How to optimize the Photo Library. If the reason you want to delete photos from iCloud library is that they are taking up too much space on your Mac, you should try using CleanMyMac X to optimize your photo library first. CleanMyMac has a Photo Junk removal tool that removes files that your Mac.
  • If the photos on your Mac are taking over your hard drive, or you just want to start your photo and video collection afresh, the good news is that Photos for Mac allows you to delete all the media.

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.

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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.

How To Erase Photos From Photo Library Mac Os

Move your Photos library to an external storage device

  1. Quit Photos.
  2. In the Finder, go to the external drive where you want to store your library.
  3. In another Finder window, find your library. The default location is Users > [username] > Pictures, and it's named Photos Library.
  4. 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

  5. After the move is finished, double-click Photos Library in its new location to open it.
  6. 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.

How To Delete Multiple Photos From Photo Library On Mac

How to delete photos from icloud photo library on mac

Open another Photos library

If you have multiple libraries, here's how to open a different one:

  1. Quit Photos.
  2. Press and hold the Option key while you open Photos.
  3. Select the library that you want to open, then click Choose Library.

Photos uses this library until you open a different one.

Learn more

How To Delete All Photos From Photo Library On Mac

If you have a permissions issue with your library, you might be able to resolve the issue by using the Photos library repair tool.

How To Delete Photos From Photo Library On Macbook Air

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.