Photos on iPhoto or Photos for Mac

Do you have Time Machine enabled for your iMac or some other backup strategy? If not you should and the easiest is with Time Machine as it's automatic and will make hourly, incremental back-ups. Having Time Machine enabled will automatically backup your photos and the iPhoto/Photos library.

KiwiAnne wrote:

Yes, we are running Time machine but I wanted to clear my old iMac and make sure I had thumbnails for all my old photos stored on another drive.

By thumbnails you mean copies of the original image files, right. The only way to get the originals is to export the photos out of the library as originals:

I would be *very* cautious about using this product on a Mac where you're using Photos or iPhoto. There is no indication on the website that it has any awareness of the intricacies of the library structure. At best you risk getting thousands of thumbnails/previews/originals treated as independent files, and worst you get massive data corruption of your Libraries.

If you want to back up your photos, and you should, then a less expensive and equally effective method would be to simply make a copy on an external drive.

Or, if you want something the size of the photo stick then

Select all the snaps in your library

Export them to a folder on the desktop

Drag the folder to a flash drive.

Done.

What is the photo stick?

You can always export the photos you need from iPhoto, or Photos to a folder and access them from there