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

Terence,

I tried this by following your instructions, and now I can't open my photos from my computer or my external drive. What did I do wrong, and can I fix it?

micah212 wrote:

Why does my drive have to be in Mac OS X Journaled? Can I use ExFAT?

Because no other format will work including ExFAT

LN

What format is the drive (select the drive in the finder and get info to see the format) and how is it connected?

LN

HI dawnmre73,

I had the same issue (albeit with a correctly formatted external HD that expired). Have you tried right clicking on the library in Finder and then Show Contents?

Although I didn't recover my library, I was able to find all of the original files and add them to a new library. Not ideal but better than losing the lot.

I have a Mac Book Pro and am a complete novice when it comes to Apple, last used an Apple 2e back in high school. (yes I know, that make me old)

I have a huge pile of Photos on my hard drive I would like to:

A) move to an external drive to free up working space.

B) be able to access them (the photos) from Photoshots elements.

It seems my laptop is by default saving everything to my Photos, things on the tool bar at the bottom of my screen. and when I try to import the photos to PS its greyed out. Help Please oh great minds. Thanks in advance.

1. Make a decision: Do you want to use Photos at all? If yes, there is one way forward, if no, then a different one.

2. You can't "import photographs" to PS. It's not a place, it's a tool. You may want to open and edit them with PS - his can be done no matter which option you choose.

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.