Apple Photos: Large library limit for 75,000 images?

Question

Level 1

9 points

Apple Photos: Large library limit for 75,000 images?

I'm just getting started with Apple Photos; still on the learning curve. I'm running o/s 26 Tahoe on a MacBook Air silicon 2M. I have a collection of about 75,000 images (about 1500 short videos--under 5 min. The rest are still photos.). I'm not a professional photographer; just someone with rather large collection of personal photos. Before I dive into importing and organizing my collection, I have a question. Is there a limit to the number of images I should put in a Photos library? I want to keep all of my photos together; I do not want to break them up into multiple libraries. Can Photos 26 handle my large collection of images, or should I look for a different app? Thanks for any info/suggestions!

MacBook Air, macOS 26.5

Posted on May 21, 2026 2:59 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

166,250 points

May 21, 2026 4:09 PM in response to New Appler

Yes Photos can manage a 75k library. And you'll have room to grow as well but remember the performance of the library is not just a function of the amount of items, but also things like the power of your machine, how much RAM it has, how much free space on the disk you have and so on.

Reply

Answer 2

May 21, 2026 10:49 PM in response to New Appler

New Appler wrote:

Thank you! I'll go ahead and start importing.

Great! Remember to make regular backups with the built-in Time Machine or 3rd party Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper.

If the library is on an external disk remember to backup it to another external disk (both formatted as APFS, GUID partition scheme, case-insensitive, set Finder > Get Info > Ignore ownership on this volume flag ON for those volumes).

Reply

Answer 3

New Appler Author

Level 1

9 points

May 21, 2026 4:35 PM in response to Yer_Man

Thank you! I'll go ahead and start importing.

I'm not a huge fan of Apple Photos, but it will do for now since it can handle my image collection.

Reply