Q: Moving photos to external hard drive following migration from iPhoto to Photos
I've got a huge number of photos and have run out of space on my MacBook. After doing a bit of reading I have worked out that I should be bale to move my photo library to an external hard drive and then point Photos to run from the external hard drive.
I have very recently upgraded to El Capitan and as part of that upgrade my photos were migrated from iPhoto to Photos. I have just checked the current location of my Photo library and I found two. One is named Photos Library and that looks like the one Photos is using which makes sense. However, I also have a file called iPhoto Library and it is listed as a migrated library under file type.
My question is, when I copy my photos to the external hard drive do I also need to copy the migrated iPhoto library file as well?
MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X El Capitan (10.11)
Posted on Dec 1, 2015 2:48 AM
Is there a danger that I will break those links by moving both libraries to a new location, i.e an external hard drive.
Hard links do not work across different disks. When you move the iPhoto Library and the Photos library to a different drive, the linked files will be copied as independent files. The copied libraries will need more storage on the external drive, because they will no longer be hard linked.
For back up purposes, I intend to back up manually to a second external hard drive, do I also need to be copying both libraries? Although it still looks like I have iPhoto on my Mac, I don't intend to use it and will be using only Photos going forward.
I would keep a backup of the original iPhoto library, until you are sure, that all photos migrated correctly. Even if the thumbnails appear to be correct the original image files may be corrupted or missing.
Posted on Dec 1, 2015 4:52 AM