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How To Save Mac Photo Library To External Hard Drive

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. Dec 20, 2019  Photo Library is home to all your photos, albums and slideshows. If you are trying to free up Mac storage, it is wise to transfer all your photos from MacBook to external hard drive. Luckily, this post will show you the latest solution to move photo library from Mac to external hard drive. Nov 12, 2019  The best way to back up your iCloud Photo Library is to download all its content to your Mac. Your entire digital library is probably huge, so you may need a Mac with a massive drive to handle the volume. Otherwise, back up your iCloud Photo Library to an external drive attached to your Mac.

Aug 27, 2013  Using external drives to save space on your Mac? Format them first. While drives are sold as plug-and-play, formatting prior to use will give you optimal performance.

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, everyone loves to capture photos of every single moment and wants to save all those moments in his/her personal devices like Mac. But saving all your photos can fill-up your Mac storage quickly and you may face the shortage of space.

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There are many options to store your photos data. One of them to store your photos on iCloud photo library but the drawback of saving your photos on iCloud is, if you delete the photo from your device it will be deleted from iCloud as well.

One question raised up here is that what we can do to store all our photos to some safe place if we are running out of space on Mac?

Fortunately, you have visited the right place to find the solution to your problem. There is a safer and easy way to transfer your entire photo library from your Mac to your external drive. The best of this trick is whenever you need to see your photos on your Mac you just need to open photo library app on your Mac it will automatically take you to your saved photos in external hard drive until unless it is plugged in.

Snapshot of the guide

There is a quick snapshot of the guide so you can understand quickly how to move the library to external drive.

  • Prepare your external hard drive to move Photo Library. Make sure drive is formatted as MacOS Extended Journaled.
  • Go to the location of the Photo library and move it to external drive.
  • Set the external library as a System Photo Library (So whenever you open the Photos app it will open the photos library from the external hard drive.)
  • After completing trasfer to drive, make sure this external drive is connected to your Mac whenever you want to access photos.

Our article will help you to move your photos from Mac to external hard drive. Continue reading the steps are about to start.

Do not worry if you have already stored your photos on iCloud photo library. Our article will help you to get back your already saved photos in iCloud photos library and will help you to move them to external hard drive. Here is how to do it.

How To Save Mac Photo Library To External Hard Drive Windows 10

System Photo Library vs Other Library

When you run Photos app on your Mac first time this will ask you to create a new or use an old library. That default Photo library became the system library automatically. Only System Photo Library are allowed to access iCloud services.

You can create multiple other libraries and work with photos only in one library at a time. To work in another library you have to switch the library. You can also change and set one of the other libraries as a System library.

How to transfer the Photos library to a hard drive

First, make it sure the hard drive you are going to use for Photos library is faster and have enough space. It will save your time and stored your memories quickly. A good hard drive always keeps your stuff secure and there are fewer chances of losing your data.

Before going step by step to move your photo library to external hard, first make it sure that your external hard drive is already formatted for Mac OS Extended (journaled). If it is not formatted for Mac first erase all the data from it and format and choose the option of Mac OS Extended (journaled). Use the Disk Utility on your Mac to erase any hard drive (When you erase any drive in mac everything will be deleted, so please save any important data ).

  1. Find the Photos Library on your Mac, it will be in your Pictures folder. Click the Go menu on the top and then select Home option from the menu.
  2. Open the Pictures folder and there you will find the Photos library.
    TIP: In order to see how much storage your photos have taken, just Ctrl+Click on the photos library icon and click on Get Info. Now you can make sure that you have enough storage in your external hard drive.
  3. It’s time to copy your Photos Library to your external hard drive using drag and drop trick. Now sit back and wait until copies over. The time of transferring photos depends on the size of your Photo Library.
  4. When transferred completed, press and hold the Option/Alt key from keyboard and click the Photos app icon from Dock to open it. Keep holding the keyboard key until you see a window otherwise this will open the Photos app.
  5. You will see a new window to choose the library. On that window hit the button Other library. Navigate to the new location on your external hard drive and choose the Photo Library.
  6. If there is a message that shows “there are some items that need to be downloaded from iCloud Photo library” then you need to click on delete incomplete items and download all those incomplete items.

    Set a photo library as System Photo Library

    We have already moved the library to an external drive now its time to set it as System Photo Library. Doing that will allow it to use iCloud service.

  7. Open the Photo Library from the external drive.
  8. Click Photos men and then select the Preferences option.
  9. On the next window click General and then click Use as System Photo Library button (this will help you to get it to work with iCloud Photo Library)
    TIP: Remember this is the step you need to perform in future If you accidentally unlinked the external drive’s photo library from the Photos app.
  10. Go to System Preferences then iCloud then Photos then Options, and choose iCloud Photo Library to turn that back on. See if you have stored all the photos here.

Note: you will need to plug in your external hard drive in order to see your photos).

Library

Delete Photo Library from Mac

Once you have confirmed that all the photos in the library moved to the external drive. You can delete the Photo Library from your Mac computer. Go to the Pictures folder and delete it to free up space from your mac.

Save Mac Photos To External Hard Drive

How to back up your iCloud Photo Library

If you want to move all your photos which you have already backed up to your iCloud photo library to a storage device connected to your Mac. Follow our step by step guide above, but you need to download all the images from iCloud first.

How To Save Mac Photo Library To External Hard Drive Mac

If you have already transferred your Photos library onto the external storage device, now you need to follow these steps.

  1. Open Photos on your Mac.
  2. Click Photos then click on Preferences.
  3. Click on the iCloud tab.
  4. Choose Download originals to this Mac.

Now all your iCloud photos will be saved on the storage device. (If you are running short of space you would probably not want to do that)

How To Save Mac Photos To External Hard Drive

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