Hi, I’ve a new Mac and want to transfer info from the old one, however as I have a lot of photos these are stored on a separate drive which is where I want them to stay. What’s the best way to move the data over and keep the photos on the external hard drive?
You should be able to transfer over the external drive pretty much separately from doing the main migration.
The main migration could be using
I would advise against trying to migrate over Wi-Fi.
Once you've got the new Mac set up, you could attach the external drive with the photo library on it.
If these were in a Photos library (as in the Apple Photos application), you could hold down the Option key while launching Photos on the new Mac, to bring up a dialog that would let you select the Photos library on the external drive. You'd normally only need to do this once, unless you were switching between libraries on a regular basis.
Note that the new Mac might decide to upgrade the format of the Photos library. (This has to do with the version of Photos, and would happen whether or not the old library was on an external drive.)
You should be able to transfer over the external drive pretty much separately from doing the main migration.
The main migration could be using
I would advise against trying to migrate over Wi-Fi.
Once you've got the new Mac set up, you could attach the external drive with the photo library on it.
If these were in a Photos library (as in the Apple Photos application), you could hold down the Option key while launching Photos on the new Mac, to bring up a dialog that would let you select the Photos library on the external drive. You'd normally only need to do this once, unless you were switching between libraries on a regular basis.
Note that the new Mac might decide to upgrade the format of the Photos library. (This has to do with the version of Photos, and would happen whether or not the old library was on an external drive.)
Not enough information for us to tell, did you backup the photos using Time Machine? If you are unsure, try restoring a photo (or photo library) from Time Machine.
Migrating to new mac
