Q: Consolidating Photos library to external drive?
Travelling. Filled up my laptop hard drive with photos. Now home. Want to MOVE that large collection of photos to an external drive. Would actually like to just move all of the Photos Library to an external drive. Don't want to just export out everything (extremely large number of photos) to the external drive and then delete what is on the laptop. Or, if I have to, what is the protocol for this?
Ideally I'd like to be able to create separate Photos Libraries or Projects on various external drives.
Is there a way to do this.
All ears, Ben
MacBook Pro (15-inch Glossy), Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Posted on Oct 30, 2015 9:53 AM
You can have several Photos Library and switch between them. And the libraries can be on external drives.
You can just drag the Photos Library to the external drive in the Finder.
The external drives should be formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled). Check the file system of the external before you move a Photos Library there.
This Help page explains, how to use more than one library and to switch between them:
https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/?lang=en#/pht6d60b524
And this document describes how to format an external drive, if the file system is not MacOS Extended (Journaled) : Format external drives to Mac OS Extended before using with Aperture - Apple Support
Posted on Oct 30, 2015 10:04 AM


