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

This is simple, and it's done exactly the same as with iPhoto.

Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

1. Quit Photos

2. Copy the Photos Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.

3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching Photos. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.

4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.

Regards

TD

Hello,

I'm having to do a similar operation and have a couple questions:

Basic info:
-I'm using a 2008 iMac, upgraded to Yosemite 10.10.3

-The drive I bought is "WD Elements Basic Storage 1TB" -- and I've already reformatted to Mac OS Extended, Journaled format.

First question:

When I open pictures folder, it shows both a "photos library" as well as my old "iPhotos library". I'm pretty sure photos incorporated all the data from the iphotos library into the photos library, but I'm not sure how it all works. Do I have to copy them both? Or, once I copy the photos library, can I just trash the iphotos one. (or is there a reason it was retained in the first place?) Anyway, I've started by dragging the "photos library" to the newly formatted drive. Which leads me to my next question...

Second question:

How long should this transfer take??? after some prep time, it finally gave an estimated time of 23 hours....then a few minutes later is shot up to "about a day, then a few minutes later...."about 4 days" (!!!) ...now it seems to have settled back down to "about a day". I did some googling and found that transferring roughly 200gb of data via USB 2.0 could take up to 7-8 hours. Long time, but that I could accept as reasonable. But given the situation I've described, something seems to be going wrong, am I right?

The only other pertinent info I can think of is that the drive is USB 3.0, but clearly states that it's compatible with USB 2.0. And the other main issue with the iMac (which is the main reason I'm going through all this in the first place) is that it only has about 3gb of space left on it. and has been running quite slow lately.

ok, before I send this off, I checked once more and now the time has finally dropped to 7 hours...so maybe my poor old iMac just needed some time to get all the gears turning...but I'm going to leave the questions and post them anyway for the first one, and in case something goes wrong again regarding the second one.

Thanks for any help or advice you can offer!

-Paul

Hello Everyone. I have a problem related to this topic. I just moved my photos library to an external hard drive and followed all the procedures you guys mentioned in this post. Its working fine as well. Only problem I am facing is that the photos I click with my iPhone now are not coming in my photos app. I even tried icloud dot com and they are not even showing there. I unchecked all my icloud settings on my iphone and on photos app on mac and rechecked them to make sure something changes. But no luck 😟 If anyone of you can help me with this problem it will be highly appreciated.
Thanks In Advance

Paul_Adrian

have you found an answer to your first question?

First question:

When I open pictures folder, it shows both a "photos library" as well as my old "iPhotos library". I'm pretty sure photos incorporated all the data from the iphotos library into the photos library, but I'm not sure how it all works. Do I have to copy them both? Or, once I copy the photos library, can I just trash the iphotos one. (or is there a reason it was retained in the first place?) Anyway, I've started by dragging the "photos library" to the newly formatted drive. Which leads me to my next question...

I am about to move the Photos Library to an external drive and have the same exact question in mind.

Thanks

And... this will move the Library out of TimeMachine's MacHD backup, right?

If my system Photo library is on an external and I copy it over to my internal drive and make that copy the system Photo library will it maintain my iCloud photo library or will it try and re-sync everything.

Another way put it is, will the library be recognised as the same as before and work as per normal when I copy it from external to internal drive.

Many thanks,

PT

Copying the Photos library by simply dragging it to an external drive seems a trivial task.

However I when dealing with a very large one (254GB) it states that it needs 3 day's or more despite using a thunderbolt connection and SSD drives.

Is there a way to copy this Library more efficiently?

Terminal command perhaps?

No. The Finder is a liar. It won't take that long.

Yes it does :-(

Then you have other issues. I'd expect that to take a ballpark of two or three hours.

No I am doing this routinely.

For example I just moved a Mail folder on a mac from one user to an other on the same drive. The Mail folder was only 12 GB but it still took over one hour.

What formats are the drives?

OSX extended