MacBook Pro 13" (2020) for photographic editing (post-production) & Video Editing

To move your Photos Library, follow these instructions -> Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

To move the Music and the TV libraries, do the following:

Copy the existing Music and/or TV folders containg their libraries to your external drive. The default location of these folders is in your home folder:

• /users/<yourusername>/Music
• /users/<yourusername>/Movies/TV

Copy these entire folders & their contents to your external drive. Then, in the Music and TV apps change their preference settings for their library locations: (Music > Preferences > Files and TV > Preferences > Files). Once changed, click OK, then close the app. When you restart the app it will use the new location.

Once you are satisfied the move has been made successfully and all is working properly you can delete the original libraries from your internal drive. ps. in the case of Music & TV, don't delete the /Music or /Movies/TV folders on your internal drive; just delete their contents.

***Make sure you have a good backup before doing this.***

It's kind of a low end machine for your purposes, especially video editing. While the i5 is a good processor, at 1.4GHz it's running at rock bottom speed. This was the basic model when released. The 16GB RAM is sufficient for most purposes but performance may be sub par with very large images (50MB+) especially if you multiply layers or composite images; it will probably be sluggish for video editing. And video editing on a 13" screen will get to be annoying (the library, browser & timeline panels will be crowded; and you will end up doing lots of scrolling the timeline back & forth). I would not run Final Cut or Premiere on this machine.

The single biggest issue is that you are effectively out of storage. You should try to keep your system (internal) drive below 50% utilization although with an SSD 80% may be ok. Get one or more good external drives (preferably SSDs) for storage & backup.

That said, it is a decent MacBook Pro. For video editing you might consider adding a 4K or 5K external display so you have larger "real estate" to make editing more comfortable. Regarding longevity, it's a Mac; you should expect a good long life. This model is in the "middle" of the Sonoma compatibility list, so I would expect it to be compatible with the next 2 releases of macOS unless Apple finally abandons Intel support in an upcoming version of macOS.

MacUser_777 wrote:

What types of files should I be moving off the computer onto external hard-drives? And do I move them back onto the computer when I am working on them?

User data files. Especially things that usually take up a lot of space ... Photos Library, Music Library, TV Library. Ditto Lightroom or CaptureOne catalogs. They can all be moved to an external drive and kept there; as long as the drive is connected to your Mac, the associated apps can use them from the external drive - no need to move them back to the internal drive. Same regarding all other user data files. I limit my internal drive to things I am currently working on, not long-term, general storage.

IMO, for serious photo & video editing I suggest a 1TB internal drive plus however much external storage you may need for data & backups.

If you use the MacBook the intended way you Will keep it in top shape!

250GB storage is no where near large enough for your intended purpose. And the computer is 4 years old. It won't be long before it becomes incapable of running new apps and MacOS.