Q: Want to Use the iCloud Drive for Photos
We had or photos stored on a portable disk drive. We had thought that the disk was just a back up, keeping the photos and documents out of harms way should something bad happen to the Mac HD. We increased our iCloud space to 50GB. I copied the photos from the portable drive to iCloud but now, I do NOT know how to tell Photos to start using the folder that is on the iCloud Drive. Any and all help is appreciated.
Posted on Sep 27, 2016 3:32 PM
As Larry said, the Photos Library cannot be on iCloud Drive. Apple said so here:
Updating from iPhoto to Photos for OS X - Apple Support
If you store your Photos library in a location that's part of a cloud service (for example, Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive), your library might be damaged by the syncing process. As a result, you could lose photos.
To see your photos on all your devices, you can use iCloud Photo Library. To back up your library, you can use Time Machine.
If you want the photos in iCloud, let iCloud Photo Library upload the photos to iCloud.
- Put the library back onto your external drive and double click it to open in Photos.
- Then enable iCloud Photo Library in the Photos Preferences > iCloud, but do not enable "Optimize Storage". (https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/phtf5e48489c)
- Let the library upload.
- Then create a new, empty library Photo Library on your system drive (https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.2/?lang=en#/pht6d60b524) and enable this library as your iCloud Photo Library, this time with "Optimize Storage". The full resolution image originals will not download to this new library, only optimized smaller versions.
Now you have a full backup of the library on your external drive, a full copy in iCloud with all original files, and a smaller, optimized version on your system drive to access the library in iCloud.
Posted on Sep 28, 2016 5:45 AM