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making spaces on my internal hard drive

I have now manage to move all my photos from Mac Studio hard drive to an external SSD. My mac studio hard drive still showing full. How do I make spaces by removing all existing photos from my internal hard drive ?


Library location : External SSD> Photo library

This library is not searchable in spotlight due to its location and because it is not the system photo library


Can anyone help?

Mac Studio, macOS 14.0

Posted on Oct 11, 2023 9:05 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 11, 2023 11:18 AM

First: to make the copied library your new System Library:


Start Photos holding down the Option key, and when asked, select the library on the external.

With the library open in Photos, go to Photos->Preferences->General and click Use as System Photo Library.


Then you can go to your Pictures folder in the Finder (command-shift-H to open your home folder, then double-click the Pictures folder in it), and drag the "Photos Library" to the trash, and empty it.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 11, 2023 11:18 AM in response to Comilla1971

First: to make the copied library your new System Library:


Start Photos holding down the Option key, and when asked, select the library on the external.

With the library open in Photos, go to Photos->Preferences->General and click Use as System Photo Library.


Then you can go to your Pictures folder in the Finder (command-shift-H to open your home folder, then double-click the Pictures folder in it), and drag the "Photos Library" to the trash, and empty it.

Oct 11, 2023 9:28 AM in response to Comilla1971

When you say you ‘moved’ all your photos what, exactly did you do? When data is moved from one storage device to another the data is copied and not removed from the source device unless the user specifically forced the copy and remove. Typically you would copy your entire Photos library folder to the new drive an then point the Photos app at the new drive. Is that what you did? Have you deleted the photos from the source drive? Otherwise there would be no change in storage space.


There is also no reason the new drive cannot be scanned by Spotlight unless you have specifically added the new drive to Spotlight’s ‘ignore’ settings.

making spaces on my internal hard drive

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