MacBook Air for photography

Use external storage devices with Mac - Apple Support

You can do that, but what limitation are you encountering that would require it? You wrote "Macbook air is not cutting it for photograpy." Specific information is needed. What does not cutting mean.

If you are encountering a storage limitation even 20,000 photographs is nothing particularly special, but without knowing the aggregate storage requirements of all those photographs I'm guessing if your MacBook Air only has 256 GB storage it won't be enough. 1 TB probably will be enough. You can configure new MBAs with as much as 2 TB which would certainly be enough.

To determine your Mac's storage capacity and utilization:  (Apple menu) > About This Mac > Storage

Seconding the question from John Galt – how is your MBA 'not cutting it'?

I use a MacBook Pro for photo editing, but although I'm currently switching over to a new 16" MBP, I was processing RAW files yesterday on the machine I'm switching from, a 17" MacBook Pro from 2011. I use DxO Optics Pro for RAW conversions and Photoshop CS6 for general editing, both of which are more processor-intensive than LR (especially the DxO Prime NR processing). I've got well over 40K images (RAW files and jpgs) on the computer, although I did swap out the original 500 GB HDD for a 1 TB SSD a few years ago. I could see storage being a limitation, most of my RAW files are 18 MP images (from a Canon 1D X), the 30 MP RAW files from my EOS R take up more space. But, external drives are cheap, and realistically I don't need to keep my older RAW files on my notebook internal drive anyway, I have a 10 TB NAS (20 TB RAID1) for backups (we have 5 Macs in the house) and storing files.

A MacBook Air from the past couple of years is a more powerful machine than my old MBP (which has 2nd-gen Core i7, i.e. ancient in computer time). I can say that a MacBook Air would not cut it for me, because of the small display. That's why I held off on buying a 15" MBP (well, personally – I actually have a 2017 15" MBP from work). But an external display with an Air would be fine for my photo-editing needs, possibly with a Thunderbolt SSD attached for RAW file archiving.

I think you will be happy with it, but there are too many subjective aspects for that to matter. If you don't like your Mac you can always return it for a complete refund. Put it to work because you have 14 days to decide.

voxcap wrote:

Macbook air is not cutting it for photograpy.

Why not? Mine has over 6000 photographs on it. What is it you need to do?