I am going to make the move from a 27" iMac to a Studio and monitor. I currently have an internal 8TB drive in the iMac which stores my photo library of roughly 2TB. I will not have that type of storage available with the Studio and am wondering the best way to store and access the library with an external drive.
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
be sure to also have a second drive for your Time Machine (or other) backup
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
be sure to also have a second drive for your Time Machine (or other) backup
With such a large library, you might also consider dividing it up into smaller packages. Photos noticeably slows with more than, say, 50,000 pictures. I have separate libraries for special times that have maybe 25k pictures each, which makes it more efficient to sort, rate, title, caption, crop and edit them. Then I put my favorites from there into a "favorites" library that I use for sharing and viewing, connecting it to iCloud to sync with my phone and iPad. The Library I'm working on is usually not the system library. I use PowerPhotos to quickly swap between libraries.
If blazing speed is not critical and budget is get an external rotational hard drive from OWC. I recommend drives from OWC (MacSales.com) as they have proven reliability, excellent customer support and warranties. Consider one of these depending on your budget and needs:
If you decide to go all SSD for the external drive for your model contact OWC's customer support and get their recommendation for the SSD model that would best suit your iMac model, work requirements and budget. They many different external SSD models to choose from. OWC is considered the premier 3rd party hardware supplier for Macs by most users here.
If you're not going to trade in your current Mac as part of the new purchase open it up and remove the 8TB drive and put it in an OWC enclosure. You can then remove all of the other files and keep it just for your Photos library and documents.
OWC does have a variety of 4 TB SSD available. Again contact their Customer Support to see which would suit you best.
Managing a large photo library
