Pictures folder on Mac doesn’t contain all photos in Photos
There are over 37,000 pictures in Photos but only 68 pictures in my pictures folder. Where are the rest? I’m wanting to back up my library to an external hard drive.
iMac 21.5″, macOS 12.7
Question marked as
The pictures you see in Photos are in your library. Your library looks like a single file when viewed in Finder, but it is really a complex structure called a package.
The default location for a Photos library on a brand new Mac account is in your Pictures folder, but you can move it elsewhere. (I was going to say anywhere, but there are some places that are worse than others. DO NOT move it to your iCloud Drive folder, for example.)
The default name for a Photos library on a brand new Mac account is "Photos Library.photoslibrary", but you can create one with almost any name (but the same type suffix). You can even create more than one, in more than one location and switch among them, but only one can be active at once in Photos (and some other ways).
If you want to know the name and location of your active Photos library, open the Photos application, choose Settings... > General from the Photos menu, and examine the Library Location line.
As you can see, mine is on the default location with the default name.
By the way, those photos that you see lying around loose in the Pictures folder are not now part of the library. They might have been imported (copied) to the library or exported (copied) from the library in the past, but you can't tell by looking at them.