Copying photos to USB Flashdrive

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Level 1

69 points

Copying photos to USB Flashdrive

I have a PNY USB Attache flashdrive. All of my photos are in the Apple "Photos" application. I backed up some photos last year with this flashdrive and I still have a lot of space. I want to add photos but when I plug the flashdrive in, it goes to the photos I already backed up and there is no indication of how to add additional back-ups. I tried grouping the photos in an album in Photos and then exporting the photos to "Pictures" under documents in the finder. I tried dragging and dropping the photos from Finder but it doesn't accept them. Any ideas?

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)

Posted on Feb 15, 2016 9:54 AM

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Answer 1

LarryHN

Level 10

106,142 points

Feb 15, 2016 10:17 AM in response to Lourufmom

How to use your your external devices is not a subject of this forum but is for the support organization of the external device

As to flash drives the typical method is to select the photos In Photos and export (file menu ==> export) to a desktop folder then drag that folder to the flash drive - once you have exported to the desktop folder Photos is out of the picture and you are using the Mac OS finder and the external device only

LN

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

216,118 points

Feb 19, 2016 11:36 AM in response to Lourufmom

If you want to backup your Photos library to that flash drive you should use an application like Synk, Synk Pro or Chronosync that does incremental backups, i.e. backing up only those new or modified files. After the first backup subsequent backups go very fast as only a few files need to be copied.

Of course the flash drive must be formatted OS X Extended (journaled).

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