how to move the photos library

Now I want to move it to another external disk (SSD). 56 GB

I don't manage to do it, I get some failure report just at the end. I tried to zip an reopen, but no success. Is there an Idea to quit Photos and reinstall it?

How are you moving the library to the external drive? It should suffice to drag and drop the library in the Finder from one drive to the other drive.

The external drive should be directly connected and formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled). Enable the "Ignore Ownership on this volume" option.

I get some failure report just at the end.

What error message exactly? Perhaps an "Error -36"? Post back with the exact error message.

In iPhoto there is an option to change libraries, but I do not see any possibilty for that in Photos.

In Photos you can switch to a different library by dragging that library onto the Photos icon or by holding down the alt/options key while launching Photos. That will bring up the library chooser panel.

To set the "Ignore Ownership" flag on your external drive select it in the Finder and press the key combination ⌘I to open the Info panel. Th flag in in the sharing and permissions section of the Info panel.

Error -36 is an i/O error. One or more files in your library cannot be copied.

There may be several reasons for that - bad media files, incompatible file names, permission errors, a drive that is failing.

Is your new SSD correctly formatted as MacOS Extended (Journaled)? You did not answer that part of the question. If the file system is still FAT32 or another Windows file system, you get exactly this kind of errors (iPhoto: Issues with FAT32-formatted drives)

Launch Disk Utility (from the Applications > Utilities folder) and select your drive in the sidebar.

Check the file system format, and run "Verify Disk".

The format of the SSD is EXFat.

That may be causing the I/O errors when trying to copy.

Do you have any files on the drive, that need saving? Reformatting will erase all data on the drive. Copy the files that need saving to another drive.

Then proceed as described in this Support document: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201909

Eiter drag the copied library onto the Photos icon to open it

or hold down the alt/options key while double clicking the Photos icon to bring up the Library Chooser panel and to open the library in Photos.

You're Welcome 🙂