How to move Photos Library to External Hard Drive on Mac

hey how you doing hopefully you're having a great day my name is emilio and on this channel we talk about all things tech and specifically today we're going to be looking at how to move your photos library or how to relocate your photos library onto an external hard drive we're on a mac my particular version that we're doing this on is big sir but if you're not running big sur that's fine if you're running an early one or a later one that's fine this process will still work so we're going to talk about that in this video before we do get into that please as always subscribe clicking on that button and on the belt so you don't miss out on any of my videos okay so two things that you need for this particular video you need of course a mac running at least a relatively new one version of mac os now as i said we are running big sur and the second thing that you will need is also an external hard drive now you need to get yourself a usb stick and that is large enough to be able to store your photos library now of course your photos library is going to be a specific size so if you have a 200 gig photos library which is not uncommon nowadays you're going to need an external hard drive that is at least that size if not more because of course you've got to think about future growth so if you do move it onto that hard drive and then over the next two three four five years you go and take a lot of photos you now need to add them onto there that photos library is going to grow so you may need to get yourself a hard drive that is double triple or even four times the size so that you ensure that you're not going to run out of space down the track so let's now crack onto our mac we're going to log in right now and then go through those steps so here we are on our mac now why do you want to actually get your photos library on to an external hard drive well the most common reason is because you're running out of space on your mac your photos library can be big can be real big and it's taking up a lot of space on your mac and you can easily transfer it to an external hard drive and then just point your photos app on your mac to the external hard drive and that's it easy peasy so what we're going to do is um we're going to show you where to do this so on our mac you open up the finder okay that's the very first point you can open up the finder here on the bottom left hand corner this is the finder and then we're going to navigate to our pictures right here okay and in here you've got the folder that you are looking at is this one right here this is an actual repository of your photos library this is where your library sits it's called photoslibrary.photoslibrary yours could be called something different but that's essentially what you're looking for it gives you a bit of information or when it was created the size of your library etc now i'm doing this just for a demo so my library is actually quite small but yours is probably going to be a lot bigger okay and of course all your photos are stored in here so when you open up the photos app which is this app right here photos right here you may have that in a different location in your dock you may also have it within applications and within applications you've got the photos app right there okay now when you do open up the photos app it automatically points to this particular file and opens it up that's essentially where everything is kept right so what you need to do is you need to now copy that file to an external hard drive so just remembering that you need to get yourself a hard drive that is big enough to be able to store your photos library so i've got myself a usb stick this is my usb-c that i'm going to be using this is a 32 gig usb stick of course if your library is bigger get yourself either a big usb stick like this or better an actual external proper hard drive that can actually store a lot more capacity you're going to get that you're going to plug it into your mac all right now that should show up and what you may need to do in this in the very first case is you may need to go and format that hard drive if you need to go and format it what you do is you open up the little spotlight on the very top right hand corner type in disk utility it opens up right in here and in here here is my external hard drive formatting it to mac os extended or apfs which is a newer one so i would probably say apfs is the one that you should be selecting but either of the two will work so once it's formatted you want to make sure there's enough capacity on that external hard drive and then we we're just going to copy this particular pictures photos library so we're going to right click on it and say copy right here we're now going to open up my usb right here right click and say paste so that'll now paste that library into there you can also do a drag and drop by literally grabbing it and just dragging it into here now this is going to take a bit of time now if your photos library is quite large it will take a fair bit of time to actually do this i would also recommend that your photos app is shut do not have your photos app open when you're doing this copy over okay so the copy is now completed it's now sitting in our external hard drive and as i said it could take a fair bit of time on yours if it's a very very very big library but once it's in there by default when you do go and open up your photos app again it's going to go use your existing library so if i go ahead and open up photos right here here is my photos library and you go oh great it's done it well no it hasn't it's still reading the photos library that is within my pictures folder you can see this by the way if you go into the photos at the very top on your taskbar and select preferences you can see right there that's the library location okay that's exactly where it is pointing so that is not good it's still pointing to the old location so let's go ahead and close out of our photos library so what we now need to do is we now need to tell the photos library to point to this new photos library here okay so what we're going to do is on your keyboard you're going to hold down the option key so the option key is located between the control and the command key just to the left of the spacebar key on your mac keyboard so hold down that option key continue to hold it and then go and actually open up your photos app while you are holding it what's going to happen you're going to get this window that shows up right here choose a photos library from the list find another library on your computer or create a new library now at the moment it doesn't know where it is okay so this is now pointing to the library that i've got currently but what i need to now do is now select other library so i'm going to select other library right here i'm now going to go and navigate to my external hard drive and select that library right there and say open so what that is now doing is it's now configuring the actual settings on my computer for that photos app to now point to the new photos library on my usb external hard drive and there it is it's done it's now working now you're probably going to have a lot more photos than me you've probably got albums and events and things like that all configured but you can actually check that this has worked by going in the same area that we looked at photos preferences and you'll see that now within here it actually shows me that that is my ea's 32 gig external hard drive and there is my photos library so now what you can actually do is you can actually now go into the finder and go to the original location where you had your pictures under here and this is the original photos library and now you can actually delete it you can actually move it to the trash click on this or i can do a command delete and now it's in the trash and i can now go and empty my trash and it's now gone okay what this has done is actually sort of created like a reference file um it's don't worry about that it still needs to have something in there to sort of reference where the new location is but now you should have freed up a whole bunch of space on your hard drive we can now close out of our photos and then the next time we open it up it will remember and it should open up the photos library that is already within your hard drive that you've copied over so hopefully you found this helpful now if you are interested um you've got a mac uh i love the mac hopefully you love the mac as well i do have some training courses available that may help you out a little bit on the mac as well down in my description i've got two training courses that you could definitely find helpful uh they're very very cheap but there are hours and hours worth of content there that will help you to become a better mac user a bit more of a professional mac user as well the first one is all around how to speed up your mac and the second one is about elementary stuff around how to use the mac and perhaps switching from windows to the mac and some of the tips and tricks around there so do check those out but other than that thank you so much for spending the time checking out this video really appreciate it let me know in the comments what you thought give me a thumbs up and do subscribe to my channel as well so you don't miss out on anything clicking on some of those videos as well so that you can see essentially what is happening in the world of tech thanks again we'll see you next time

Channel: Emilio Aguero

Views: 7,626

Keywords: Move Apple Photos Library to External Drive, how to transfer photos from mac to external hard drive 2020, how to move apple photos library to external hard drive 2021, how to move apple photo library to usb drive, how to move photos from mac to external hard drive, how to transfer photos from mac to external hard drive, apple photos library to external hard drive, apple photos libary to usb drive, Move Apple Photos Library to External usb Drive on macOS, apple photos on usb

Id: -IwYhtEfByU

Length: 9min 11sec (551 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021