Managing Photos

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Level 1

8 points

Managing Photos

So I've been looking through the previous posts, and tbh, they start at a point beyond my knowledge base. My goal is to get my entire photo library onto an external hard drive, separate from the external hard drive I use to do the Time Machine back ups. Then I would delete most of the photos from the "active" library, so when looking for photos I wouldn't have 10,000+ to search through. I purchased a second external hard drive. How do I format it so that it doesn't just do full backups? How do I move my photo library onto it? I want to have all of my photos, just not on all my devices all the time. Anyone care to help this fairly computer illiterate grandmother who is photo obsessed? TIA :)

Posted on Mar 5, 2021 12:59 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Keith Barkley

Level 7

20,862 points

Mar 5, 2021 1:39 PM in response to msiamjan

This will walk you through all the steps:

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

But if you use some of the organizing tools, you might not have to look through 10000 photos.

Do you use faces?

Do you set keywords?

Do you set places - this might be done for you if most of your pictures come from an iPhone.

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Answer 2

Mar 5, 2021 11:49 PM in response to msiamjan

Hi

What specifically in the instructions you read are you confused by. We can probably help you with that.

But in summary -

format the drive (using disc utility) MacOS extended (journaled) - if a spinnning drive or APFS if SSD. Don't try to use this drive for storing the time machine backup.
Set the "ignore ownership" flag (it probably will be by default)
Create a folder on the drive.
Copy the entire library to the folder.

Open the external library by pressing the option key while starting photos.

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Answer 3

msiamjan Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 5, 2021 2:03 PM in response to Keith Barkley

Thank you. I had read this, but still was a little confused. Maybe I’ll try it and see if I get stuck. Many of my photos are old and were scanned from paper pictures, so they don’t have any helpful coding. Even the dates don’t help, because they are the dates scanned rather than when the photo was taken. I tried redating them, and did some, but the task is a rather heavy lift. Faces helps some, but I have a lot of pics without people. Also the recognition software doesn’t catch them all, and again doing it by hand is something I’ll do, but takes a lot of time. I thought it would help to just have the photos I’m likely to use the most in the cloud storage so they’re handy on my other devices.

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Answer 4

léonie

Level 10

197,117 points

Mar 6, 2021 2:00 AM in response to msiamjan

Keith is right. It helps to add the approximately correct dates, faces, and locations to the scanned photos, also titles and keywords. Then you can quickly find the photos you want.

It does not matter to add the exact date or time - just try to give photos, where you know they have been taken at the same event a similar date and time, so you get them chronologically into the correct order.

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Answer 5

Mar 5, 2021 3:20 PM in response to msiamjan

The key is to do the organizing as you add the photos. You can add a date to a photo after the fact, but with thousands of photos it can be monumental.

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Managing Photos

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