I am wondering what people are doing for storage options with Apple Photos? My laptop has run out of storage space and I don't really feel like spending money on a new computer with a larger hard drive. I also am not keen on uploading all my photos to the cloud.... Has anyone had luck moving there photos library to an external storage hard drive?
Thanks
Moving your Photos Library to an external is trivial.
Make sure it's formatted Mac OS X Extended, Journaled or apfs. Then drag the Photos Library from the Pictures Folder to the external. Double click on the dragged copy to open it. when you're sure the move has gone well delete the copy on your internal.
remember that you still need another drive to back the library up to.
Moving your Photos Library to an external is trivial.
Make sure it's formatted Mac OS X Extended, Journaled or apfs. Then drag the Photos Library from the Pictures Folder to the external. Double click on the dragged copy to open it. when you're sure the move has gone well delete the copy on your internal.
remember that you still need another drive to back the library up to.
With Yer_Man's suggestion in mind take a look at this OWC external drive: 1TB OWC Envoy Pro mini. It's easy to carry with your laptop and use.
Just format it APFS, copy your library over to it, open it on the Envoy to make sure the copy was good, delete it from your laptop and continue to use it on the Envoy.
Solid State Drives can be a little pricey, but they are fast and light and small and durable. Fast is important if you keep your Photos Library on the drive. New Macs can use drives at speeds better than 1000 MB/s, which is great. With a laptop, it's worthwhile to have a portable drive the gets its power from the computer.
Since Old Toad showed you his favorite little SSD, I'll how you mine. I've recently bought the SSK Portable SSD 1TB drive from Amazon-- it's about the size of 1 1/2 flash drives, and is about 2/3 the price of the OWC pro.
Yes. I have 2 external drives connected and all are backed up by Time Machine.
Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I ended up going with a 2tb m.2 nvme ssd and an enclosure. I’m not keen on the RGB light features but it’s what I could find at a reasonable price at the time.
Im looking forward to freeing up some space on my MBP.
Thanks for the reply, I like this idea. Do you happen to know if TimeMachine will back up the external drive if its plugged into the computer when I run a backup ?
That's great! OT and I had been thinking of a portable drive to match your laptop, but this is half the price! I use a WD desktop drive for Time Machine-- works well.
Photos storage options
