Change the location of the Photos Library

I have a large amount of photos, 150,000+ and growing like crazy, in my iCloud PHOTOS App. And I have created several Photo Libraries over the years and my wife has 1-2 Photo Libraries too that she created over the years.

One day I received a message that told me the External HD that held thousands of my photos, some dating back to my deceased dad’s photos that he took on Iwo Jima where he flew P-51s, was in poor shape and needed replacing. I was in a panic! I needed a replacement HD and I wanted two other things.

I wanted a backup of all my items in my iCloud PHOTOS App. I was also tired of holding my Option key down on the PHOTOS App on startup to select one of my additional Photos Library's. So Iselected all items in my iCloud PHOTOS Account and selected Download. I was saving all of my iCloud Photos Library to my Macintosh Internal HD Downloads folder because I didn’t know how to divert the Download to another HD. What the heck I have a couple hundred GBs of storage left on my Macintosh HD and that should hold everything…Right? Wrong! After a day of downloading my iCloud files, I got a message saying I didn’t have enough HD space on my Internal HD to hold all of my photos.. I moved stuff from my Internal HD to an external HD hoping there was enough space now. It was filling up fast overnight. Then I thought about the fact that I had another 5,000 - 10,000 photos that I needed to add to my PHOTOS App on another External HD and I wasn’t going to have enough space for the Photos Library file to grow on my Macintosh Internal HD as I added additional photos to it so I stopped the iCloud Download and I remembered that I had an app that I had used years back that allows me to collect all of my Photos Library files and this app combines everything about the individual files and pulls out Duplicates, if you want it to, during the process or after the combining process into a file called “Merged Library” or actually anything you want to call it, and it will place this file anywhere you want on an Internal or External HD. It worked when I had about 200,000 photos and I had a couple iPhoto files along with my wife’s iPhoto files. I combined all of the Photo Library files in this program and the new Merged Library file came out beautiful. This program is called “PowerPhotos” by FatCat Software.

When it is done creating this one Merge Library I will just hold down my Option key and open up PHOTOS App and it will ask me what Photos Library file I want to use and I point it to my new Merged Library file and it opens up and all 150,000 items will be there. This file will become my Default Photos Library that sits on a new 5 TB External HD.

I can add miscellaneous photos, 5,000 - 10,000 of them, easily by highlighting one or all and then, right click on the highlighted files, select Share, and then select “Add to Photos”. All go to my Merged Library and it can grow as big as it wants in my new 5 TB External HD.

I do wonder if someone out there in La La Land knows how to redirect downloads to an External Hard drive? It would be a nice option to know.

I started combining eight Photo Libraries into one Merged Library file at 3:10am on 12/23/2021 and end this on, any guesses?

Here is what the program looks like at 7:36pm on 12/23/2021.

Andy

PS When I am all done I will copy the new Photos Library file to another External HD and back it up every now and then just to keep my blood🩸pressure down😳.