Help with my new 2023 Apple M1 desktop 24" iMac computer

I bought this last week after losing my 2011 iMac in an electrical storm. I pick up the basic iMac with 256GB of storage but did pay for the 4 ports in the back.

I may have made a big mistake. I have my back-up hard drive from my 2011 Mac but with all the photos and videos I have on it it's to big for my New iMac to migrate over.

I knew this would be a problem so I bought a 2GB SSD external storage. Thinking I could boot-up from this and leave the internal storage alone. So far I am having no luck moving anything to the 2GB storage.

My first Mac was back in 2005 and I was able to replace the hard drives myself in that one and the 2011.

This New M1 computer I can not and now I am thinking I should have waited to save up for more storage. Then I could have used my back-up HD form my 2011 Mac with no problems.

Any Ideas would be great. I would hate to have to sell this 2023 iMac used at a loss to save up for more internal storage that is very costly. I am on disability and it may take awhile.

Makes me sad and upset for this mistake I made.

Thank You,

Mark

iMac

Posted on Jul 19, 2023 7:24 PM

Best reply

Servant of Cats

Level 6

10,419 points

Posted on Jul 19, 2023 8:01 PM

You should be able to keep your Photos Library on an external drive.

If you hold down the Option key as you launch Photos, you'll get a dialog that will let you create or select a library to use. As long as you move the entire Photos Library (not just pieces), you can copy it to an external drive, verify that Photos will work with it in the new location, and avoid keeping it on an internal drive.

You can also set up multiple Photos Libraries, say

A small system Photos Library, on your startup drive, that's connected to iCloud Photos (for synchronizing with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch), and
A larger local Photos Library on an external drive

However, if you do have a multi-library setup, Photos doesn't make moving photos between libraries easy. It will only work with one library at a time.

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Help with my new 2023 Apple M1 desktop 24" iMac computer

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