How do I move my photos library to an external drive?

. But since the older iPhoto library is larger, I'm confused, and I'm not sure that I should delete that. I'm also not sure why it larger.

The two apps work differently. The libraries are not constructed exactly the same way. The iPhoto one, for instance, frequently contains very large caches for interoperability with iOS devices - this can easily reach 20 gigs in size.

You don't have to delete the iPhoto Library. It's your choice. If you feel safer having it around, keep it. The question is are all the images you expect to have in the Photos Library. Can you work with them? If so, then it's okay to delete the iPhoto one.

What I wrote was 'So, twice the space (more or less)', I was just not being pedantic and copying the exact figures you gave.

Not sure what that code refers to, but you could try use a back up utility to copy the Library to the external. Any utility that maintains the library in the same format will do (but that excludes Time Machine). Check out things like Chronosync or SuperDuper

It is also worth noting (as another reason to not use iCloud Photo Library as a "backup") that iCloud library does not store some critical "mac photos only" information (like any faces you may have tagged). So if you were to wipe your Mac and then re-download your photos from iCloud, all of your tagging information would be lost. In my case, I have spent hundreds of hours tagging faces and it would be a disaster to lose that information. That's why faces you have tagged do not show up on your iOS devices.

I never quite understand why there is a resistance to backing up. Just plug in an external drive and start doing it. If you store photos on an external drive, be sure to add the external drive under time machine prefs. After that, it is set it and forget it. I personally have 3 drives I use for manual back up redundancy. I even occasionally back up to an external drive and keep in my backpack (or leave it at work) so I have something offsite if my house burns down.

I have spent hundreds/thousands of hours on my family photos. They are the most valuable thing on my computer and worth protecting.

Hi, I did everything above and successfully copied the iPhotos library to an external HD

(reformatted to Mac Extended (Journaled)), and made it the main location. New photos taken on my iPhone are being automatically uploaded to the external HD. I deleted one photo as a test on the laptop internal HD and it deleted the same photo in the external HD and on my iPhone as well. I don't want to delete the iPhoto library on the internal HD in case it deletes the iPhoto library on the external HD and on my iPhone. Is there something I am missing???

Did anyone ever answer this question? I am about to move all photos over to external HD as my poor overworked Macbook is sluggish and want to ensure all will work fine once completed.

Can anyone tell me if the photos library will still be functioning as normal once we complete these steps or will I need to keep my External HD plugged in for photos to transfer to?

Did anyone ever answer this question?

Yes it was clearly answered Two Years ago on May 7 2015 and that answer was later was recommended by Apple - Did you even look at the answer?

Can anyone tell me if the photos library will still be functioning as normal once we complete these steps or will I need to keep my External HD plugged in for photos to transfer to?

If you follow the instructions everything will operate as normal and since the library is now on the EHD of course you can not use Photos uness the EHD with the library is connected and available

Just to reiterate the EHD requirements the EHD Must be a local drive formatted Mac OS extended connected with a fast wired connection like FireWire, ThunderBolt or USB 2 or 3, must always be available prior to launching Photos and must NOT be used as a Time Machine backup Volume

LN

WOW! Okay.....sorry to bother you with my question. I am not as versed on this as you clearly are.

I am just in need of moving my photos from photo library to external HD and not changing the photo library functionality.

Any suggestions?

I see that attitude a lot, Stance. Just thank them and move on.

The advice is usually fairly good - if sometimes incomplete and snarky.*

However, there are some goofy things that can happen, so, you may wish to reread the whole thread to be sure you get all the advice. I did and it was helpful.

I would add that when I copied my very large photo library to a large external hard drive, I had some bad files that stopped the copy from completing. Infuriating. It was many many Gigs, so it took a while to discover each bad file. I just started it and walked away - came back and read and made a note of the file name in the dialogue box. I ended up taking the time to copy that library over manually multiple times and each time it stopped, I went into the actual folders to pick out the files that stopped the copy process. Delete. After a few files were removed, the copy process went over without a hitch, and I redirected my photo program (crappy program that it is) to use the newly copied library on my Mac OS formatted (journaled) external hard-drive and it has worked flawlessly. Yea!

After a few days I made a second backup on another drive as a snapshot in time in case something catastrophic happened to my main library. Then I deleted the original library to get a ton of room back on my main iMac hard drive.

Good luck!

-r.

* Often times folks who know a lot about something have invested a lot of time and have a real interest in the details of something and feel like everyone else should take the same approach. What they don't realize is that many people just what their tools to work. After all, Apple users often want a tool - not a project. When asking for help, Apple users are mostly wanting a simple e fix. The bad news is, that's not always possible. Perhaps we are actually the tools of the computer/software companies? Oh well, smile and move on, right?

Thank you so much for your patience, time and kindness.

I will follow the thread from top to bottom and pick out what I need.

Again, thank you for being a soothing word. We need more of that these days!

Have a blessed day!

The answer is clearly marked as the solution and as recommended by Apple and is the second entry in the thread - sorry you find reading the question and the following answer too much trouble

You have a really good day

LN

Without steering this topic too much in the wrong direction, I feel it's compelled to step in and say a few words that describe the reality in which we live. Twitter and Facebook really have impacted us for both the better and the worse, the worse being that most people these days are mentally trained not to read beyond single paragraph. I remember back in the 80s and even 90s when computer magazines like Byte and Macworld and Mac User were so thick it will take me almost a month to read them, but now those magazines are either gone entirely or slimmed down to a few millimeters in thickness, half of which is filled with Ads rather than written content. Times really have changed.

Even I myself at the age of 46 I'm not immune. The countless demands of modern society often makes us edgy and less patient with others. We have less free time than ever before, making us seek out the quickest solution possible to the problems that we have. Rather than read an entire discussion thread online, we just click the reply button and ask our questions, ignoring the fact that it may have already been asked and answered before.

Getting back on topic...

I myself moved my entire 400 GB Photos library to an external USB3 spinning platter hard drive and I must say that it works great. And if I try to access Apple Photos without the drive turned on, I simply get an error. But that doesn't cause any problems. I just turn on the hard drive and then try to access photos again and it all works just fine.

For the sake of performance though, I am considering buying an external SSD which would make photos work as fast almost as it did previously when I had them on my internal SSD (a Samsung EVO 1 TB Drive I installed inside my late 2009 iMac).

Best wishes.

So I have recently done this and moved my 900GB (90,000 photos and videos) library to an external 2TB SSD drive.

For those of you considering it, I must say, it is a bit of a heart-pounding experience. I have spent hundreds of hours organizing my photos, making albums and tagging faces and it would be devastating to lose or damage my library. Hopefully this might ease your fears a little.

Duplicating the photos file is easy and it only took a couple of hours to copy from 1 SSD to the other. Normal HD times could be a lot longer.

The nerve wracking parts are re-syncing to iCloud when you make the new library, your "System Library".

Even after consolidating my library, I still got the "not all items have downloaded do you want to delete" message. A good tip I saw on another website was to select all the photos before selecting consolidate. Since my photos have always been stored on my mac (in my photos library) and I have migrated a libraries a few times before with no loss, I felt confident it wasn't anything important (and of course I have multiple backups).

Once that is done, then the real pain starts. Currently I am 26 hours into "uploading" my photos to my iCloud Photo Library and I am only through 20,000 items. Looks like this will take at least 4 more days. I'm leery of quitting photos and letting it only run at night because the last time I did that it started the process all over.

Good news is, it doesn't seem to be actually uploading photos, but just comparing to the files already stored in iCloud. It says I have uploaded 290 GB (out of 880) already, but a quick check of activity monitor and my Comcast bandwidth tells me that it is actually much less (maybe 20GB). Apple should really work on the messaging around things like that. At least this means I will not be going over my Comcast bandwidth limit. :-)

Finally for reference and times, I have 20M Upload and 125M Download speeds (Comcast is overdelivering on their Extreme 105 plan). I don't think the bandwidth really matters though. It seems more processor related. I have a late 2013 Quad Core 2.6 i7 and 16gigs of RAM. Currently, I am only using 5.6% of my processor so that tells me this whole thing could go a lot faster if there was an option to let Photos use more processing during this file compare. Now I'm just ticking away the hours.

It was an easy move to an external HDD for me because I don't use iCloud Photo Library. I use the free iCloud Photo Sharing instead, along with My Photo Stream (both checkbox options in Photos > Preferences > iCloud). The benefits of iCloud Photo Library are clear: my entire photo library goes with me on any Apple device wherever I go. But the caveats include COST and SYNCHING ****. In light of that, I asked myself, "Do I really need what iCloud Photo Library affords me over iCloud Photo Sharing and My Photo Stream?" The answer of course is a resounding, "No!" Heck, I don't even use Google's free cloud photo storage solution because what I use now in Photos is sufficient. If I wish to share on FaceBook, I just upload there. Ditto for Flickr. It all works well, it's free, and I don't need to spend 26 hours re-synching photos when a major move of the Photos library takes place. I've been a lover of Apple devices since 1984 and am always open to consideration of Apple services, but iCloud Photo Library just doesn't make sense for me. No doubt, I'm not alone.

Anyway, the only caveat (if we can call it that) of my move to an external HDD was that when I copied the data over, I ended up with two full libraries on the external -- my old iPhoto library and the Photos library. When they reside on the original internal drive, one contains the data and the other (or so I am told) contains links/aliases, thereby not taking up space. But when moved to an external HDD, I saw that each library was taking up 330GB of data. Why not just delete the old iPhoto Library? Well, had that library been identical in size to the Photos library, I would. But the old iPhotos Library is several GB larger, and despite having painstakingly gone through each Library, I am not finding what is different. However, I have a lot of photos and I can't remember every single one I went through when comparing the two libraries. If there was an automated tool that performed a precise comparison, showing me what was present in one library versus the other, that would be heaven!

No there is no such tool. However, there are several reasons why the iPhoto Library would be larger, including things like the iPod Photo Cache which could reach 20gigs in size. Essentially the iPhoto Library was less efficient in managing disk space.

I was able to successfully move my photo library to an external HD, photos open up just fine. Im not sure what to do with the other folders that are still on my mac HD though. Do I need to move the one labeled

Photo Library.migratedphotolibrary

and there is also another

Photos Library.photoslibrary

where as the photo library I moved to the external HD is was the

*LastName*Photos Library.photoslibrary.

My understanding is that when I was using iPhoto and then updated to the newer OXS system that did away with iPhoto and just became Photos, that is when the "Migratedphotolibrary" was created, its 126 GB.... and the Photos Library.photoslibrary is 53.9 GB

my *LastName*Photos Library.photoslibrary is 253 GB, 20K photos and videos.

Any thoughts about those other two libraries? Am I loosing data, photos, metadata if I just delete them?

Thanks in advance for any help.