I have all of my photos on an old Mac laptop that I am now trading in with Apple. I wan to copy/save/move all of these photos to an external hard drive and just keep them there. I don't intend to transfer them to my new Mac but I want to be able to see them when I want to look at "old pictures."
What is the be approach to taking these photos off of my old laptop and transferring them to the hard drive? Thanks for the help.
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15
If you have the library on a correctly formatted hard drive, then you can plug it into your new mac, and open it while it is still on the hard drive, and view the contets just as you do now on the old mac. It is not necessary to migrate it to the new mac. (Think of this like opening a pages document which is stored on an external drive).
Of course - you can also export all the separate image files to the external drive. (It may still need to be formatted APFS or MacOS extended to make this straight forward). In photos select the images you want to export, then in the file menu file>export, then choose jpg as kind, size as full and maximum quality. Click export and on the next pane, choose where to put them.
If you have thousands of images don't try to export them all in one go. Your mac may run out of memory and stall. Maximum of a few hundred at a time.
If you have the library on a correctly formatted hard drive, then you can plug it into your new mac, and open it while it is still on the hard drive, and view the contets just as you do now on the old mac. It is not necessary to migrate it to the new mac. (Think of this like opening a pages document which is stored on an external drive).
Of course - you can also export all the separate image files to the external drive. (It may still need to be formatted APFS or MacOS extended to make this straight forward). In photos select the images you want to export, then in the file menu file>export, then choose jpg as kind, size as full and maximum quality. Click export and on the next pane, choose where to put them.
If you have thousands of images don't try to export them all in one go. Your mac may run out of memory and stall. Maximum of a few hundred at a time.
iPhoto? Not Photos?
Copy the iPhoto Library from the Pictures Folder to the external drive. This should be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or apfs. iPhoto will not run on your new machine so when that arrives you can migrate the iPhoto Library to Photos simply by opening it with that app.
Sorry... I am not very familiar with the terminology! The photos are in whatever pops up when you open the photo app in my laptop.
So, if I copy the library to the hard drive (formatted!), how can I see the photos in the future? I don't want to transfer/migrate them to my new computer.
What if I export the photos to the hard drive?
You can certainly export the photos as JPEGs (again without knowing what app you are using to view the old photos this is difficult for us to make suggestions) if you are using Apple Photos app (or if memory serves correctly iPhoto which I have not used for many years). Then you could plug the new external drive into the new Mac and use a program like Preview - I am sure there might be better ones - to just view the photos if you don't want to actually import them into a new Photos library on the new Mac.
Are these photos currently in the photos app?
Yes.. They are in the iPhoto
Thanks everyone for your help.
Saving photos to an external hard drive
