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

Just struggled getting this done. No expert but this worked for me.

From your Mac open Users/'Your Macbook name'/Pictures, drag 'Photos Library.photoslibrary' to your HD.

Once copied, right click on it.

Click on: ‘Show Package Contents’

Inside you will find a folder called ‘Masters’

Move this to your HD (open new HD window and drag).

This folder has all your photos!

Hope this helps

natasjabm wrote:

Just struggled getting this done. No expert but this worked for me.

From your Mac open Users/'Your Macbook name'/Pictures, drag 'Photos Library.photoslibrary' to your HD.

Once copied, right click on it.

Click on: ‘Show Package Contents’

Inside you will find a folder called ‘Masters’

Move this to your HD (open new HD window and drag).

This folder has all your photos!

Hope this helps

Unfortunately this is really bad advice and will destroy your Photos library rendering it unusable and cause you to lose all editing and other work you have done in Photos and possibly cause you to lose all of your high quality photos

Once the poster makes a decision how they want to work and tells us we can explain how to do it without destroying everything which your suggestion does - and depending on user settings may or may not even give one any usable photos

LN

Thanks, TD! I had the same question since my internal drive is filling up, and for the time being at least, I can't justify the expense of a new iMac with a larger internal drive just for storage space. Fortunately, I have a spare external HDD that is sitting around unused.

It worked fine for me, thanks dude!

Hello Terence
As you seem to understand about this, I wonder if you could help me out with my situation.

Here´s the deal, i did all this steps (except for deleting my photos from internal hd yet) but as soon as i try to open the pictures throught the external hd, my photos app opens and it asks to change libraries. So i do it as its the only option. But right after the app closes and re-opens saying "it was not possible to open the library. Photos tried to fix the library but couldn´t open it".

Now i´m lost because i know i have the pictures on the hdd but cannot see them.
Any help?

Thank you so much for your time

What format is the external?

Never mind Terence. That was exactly my problem. Already fixed it and done everything right

Thank u for the help

Cheers mate

As far as I got by reading this thread, there is no way to make the remote library to work on ethernet hard drives (NAS) since this solution only works with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system. Do you think is there any other solution useful to make the remote library to work on ext4 drives?

Since the new Macbooks are expensive (and each hd space increase is pretty expensive) I am looking for new ways to archive my data.

Thanks,

Emanuele

Do you think is there any other solution useful to make the remote library to work on ext4 drives?

Create a disk image on the NAS, formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and put the library on that. Now you'll only have to contend with the horrible performance.

So I think I solved this and it was MUCH easier than I expected based on the responses you've received. I had 50K+ photos and needed to free up space on my old iMac which I use for my local copies of the photos. I simply bought a 4TB hard drive from the apple store for ~$150, connected it via USB, and then held down the option key when launching photos. This prompted me to setup a new primary Photos library which I did on the new external drive. I then launched photos and started to re-sync my machine to the iCloud library. Yes, it's taking a while (days) to synch, but I just leave the Photos app open and it works.

I also ported my old iPhotos library to the external drive (I wanted to keep the library just in case there were some dependencies there between Photos and iPhotos and this whole thing went sough). This was interesting. According to Finder the iPhotos library was ~350GB (really big) but when I moved it to the external drive it only ended up being about ~150GB. So somehow Photos knows how to disentangle itself from iPhotos if necessary. This helped free up a lot of space and the entire Library has remained intact on iCloud and synching to my new hard drive. Next step I'm going to move the original Photo's library from my iMac to free up another ~400GB.

BTW...the iMac is now running great with the free space and Sierra. It's re-optimized the drive and back to a usable machine. I hope this helps.

I know it's a long time, but I'm a very new mac user and I can follow step one, but cannot find how to do step 2 Copy the Photos Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.

Where do I go to find the photo library? I went to the finder, but it doesn't list Photo library or pictures folder. We have a newer mac. bought jan 2015.

Thank you

Hard Disk -> Users -> Your Name -> Pictures

Thanks for this info. I used it with Sierra and it looks like it worked! I haven't deleted the one internally...a little nervous about doing that! But from now on new photos will go to this external disk. Yay!

Yeah...I would hold onto the old iPhoto and Photo library files at lease until you're comfortable. I tried moving just the old iPhotos file to a separate drive and it appeared to work...but I'm still a bit concerned about the iCloud photos integrity.

When I go to the Photos app, then Preferences and under General, it won't let me click Use as System Photo Library. Am I doing something wrong?