Best external backup for photos?

I think all external hard drives are applicable to your needs but in my opinion I am going to find an external hard drive which have simple features. This is my favorite external hd -> http://planetoverclock.com/reviews/storage/western-digital-elements-1tb-external -hard-drive-review/

Rae, first Welcome to the Discussions.

There are several Externals available from different manufactures and at different costs. And, it depends on how you set up to use it. In my case I use my 2 terabyte for Time Machine. My 2 terabyte USB External was $129.00 that could have been used as a simple external that would have shown up on your desktop when the USB was plugged in. This would have allowed you to Drag and Drop your Photos to your External and everything would be there and would empty everthing from iPhoto. Remember you have several options available to you with an External depending on how you set it up, and for what use you select.

Cheers

Don

I currently have more then 32,000 photos on iPhoto. I am very aware that iPhoto starts acting sluggy when you throw that many pictures at it.

I have 50k+ images and no sluggishness, and an iPhoto 11 Library is good for 250,000 / 1,000,000 images, depending on the exact version you have.

How much free space on your disk?

But it stripped all of my metadata-all photos uploaded had the present day's date. It didn't keep any of my filenames. This was unacceptable. How was I going to find the things that I needed if it stripped all of my data?

The drive stripped nothing from your photos. You need to decide exactly what you want to back up.

The iPhoto LIbrary - that is, original photos, edit history, all metadata, albums, events, projects:

Most Simple Back Up:

Drag the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to another Disk. This will make a copy on that disk. The disk needs to be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

Slightly more complex: Use an app that will do incremental back ups. This is a very good way to work. The first time you run the back up the app will make a complete copy of the Library. Thereafter it will update the back up with the changes you have made. That makes subsequent back ups much faster. Many of these apps also have scheduling capabilities: So set it up and it will do the back up automatically.

Example of such apps: Chronosync- but there are many others. Search on MacUpdateor the App Store

Or just the actual Photos:

File -> Export and make your choices among the options in the export dialogue:

This User Tip

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4921

has details of the options in the Export dialogue.

Note that drag and drop from the iPhoto Window only accesses the iPhoto Previews. This are a medium quality version and missing lots of metadata - they're designed for uses like emailing or sharing into word processing documents. Exporting offers higher quality and much greater continuity of metadata.