Not too long ago using finder, I copied my photos file into an external hard drive. I wanted to keep my photos both on my Icloud and in the hard drive. Since then I have taken more photos and want to move the new photos into that copied file in my hard drive. How can I do this without copying the whole file again and just copying the new photos into the hard drive file?
Select the photos you want in what ever folder you have them in and drag them to the external backup you have. If the photos are in Photos highlight the ones you want by clicking on them and in the File menu click on Export. Choose the format that you want to export them as and, you have four choices, TIFF, JEPG, HEIC, or PNG. Click Export once you have chosen the format and select your external HD. It will export a copy to the HD and leave a copy in photos.
You have some options. First, could you let us know
I'm concerned that, if you have "Optimize" turned on for iCloud Photos, you might not have a full backup. For any backup system to work, if you're using iCloud Photos, your Photos must be set to "Download Originals." And there's a bit more to it, so you'd need to let us know.
I use Apple's Time Machine program that comes on Macs to backup my computer. I have a laptop, so I plug it in for charging when I get home, and Time Machine does an incremental backup of the whole computer. Since it's incremental, it just records changes and that's pretty fast, usually less than a couple of minutes. If your computer isn't portable, then Time Machine can do a backup every hour, and you can go back to see and recover your files from an hour ago, or from yesterday, or from last week, or from last month. It's all automatic, so I don't have to remember to do it. This is very cool!
I also drag my Library to an external drive about once a month (now when did I do it last?) With a fast SSD drive, it can take maybe 5 minutes for a 100 GB Library. (This is probably about right--it's been at least a month...) I have a laptop, so I use a small, light, fast 2TB SSD which costs about $140, I think.
There are also third party apps that do incremental backups like you want, as well. A very popular one (that I use from time to time) is Carbon Copy Cloner ($50) which has been around almost as long as Macs, and it is highly trusted. Time Machine backs up the entire computer, while CCC can be set to backup specific parts.
Let us know more about your situation, and we can help further...
transfer photos to hard drive
