Q: How do I move my photos library to an external drive?
What are the step by step instructions for moving the new Photos Library to an external hard drive in able to free up space on my MacBook's drive?
I searched the forums and did not find anything related to moving the new photos library, not the old iPhoto library. A concern I have after reading through older threads is if videos will transfer over properly. I read that videos will turn into stills. I don't want to lose my videos. I plan on making a back up of my entire MacBook via Time Machine to a separate external hard drive before I even start this process at all but I want to make sure I do all of this correctly.
I have a MacBook Pro running OS X Yosemite version 10.10.3.
I will have 2 separate external hard drives. One for the MacBook back up and one for the photos library to be stored on.
Thanks!
MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)
Posted on May 6, 2015 11:41 PM
This is simple, and it's done exactly the same as with iPhoto.
Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
1. Quit Photos
2. Copy the Photos Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching Photos. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
Regards
TD
Posted on May 7, 2015 3:22 PM


