How to Move Your Apple Photos Library to an External Drive

if you happen to use apple's photos app and you happen to have a computer that has an ssd drive with only say 256 or 512 gigabytes of space and you happen to have a phone that also has 256 or 512 gigabytes of space there will come a time where you start to run out of your space on your internal ssd because of the way that icloud photos is syncing with your hard drive if you are ready to move your apples photos library to an external drive stick around and welcome to doc rock tips [Music] aloha internet people welcome to doc rock tips i am that dude doc rock if you're new here i make videos helping people out with their tech because i'm doc rock and i'm just here to help if you happen to have a mac with a smaller ssd hard drive like this brand new imac 2020 i have with the 512 gig drive you might find out if you open the apples photos app it will start to sync the information from your iphone this is my iphone 11 pro max to your mac okay normally this is not a problem and normally i don't use the photos app i tend to use lightroom but when i was setting this computer up i guess i accidentally launched the photos app didn't think anything of it and all of a sudden it took all the data from my phone downloaded it from icloud and stored it in the apple's photo app this wouldn't be a big problem because hey there's nothing wrong with having another backup however when your phone is 512 and your imac is 512 you can run out of space let me show you what i'm talking about watch this here so here we are looking at my desktop looking at about this mac i was teaching something to a friend of mine i just so happened to click on storage on my brand new imac and it said i had 12 gigabytes left out of basically a 500 gigabyte drive 512 you know the calculation space for the operating system you basically come up with 500 gigs anyway i looked at this line right here and it said that i was using 376.5 gigabytes for photos that my friends is absolute insanity with a brand new machine literally two days old i happened to fill up my hard drive already because icloud photos decided it wanted to sync to my brand new imac and that just took up all the space i'm going to show you how to fix it the first thing we want to do looking at this is get this 376.5 gigabytes of photos off of my internal drive onto an external i just so happened to pick up a brand new sabran external ssd so we're going to move this library from the internal drive to the external drive let me show you how that is done so if we open up photos here and check the preferences you're gonna see that currently it is taking my photo library and dropping it in my home folder underneath pictures if you press show in finder it will show you that this is my photo library this is my new two terabyte external ssd all i need to do is take this photo library and drag it over to this hard drive in order to copy it to this external drive just to be safe what i'm going to do right now is close the photos app so that way icloud isn't trying to sync as i make this copy now if you see here here's my home folder here's the pictures folder and this is my photos library i'm going to drag it from the pictures folder on my internal ssd to the sabrin xtreme 2 external ssd now it's calculating and it's going to make that copy and hey just showing off the cyber and extreme q ssd it says it's going to take roughly about 12 to 13 minutes to move about 400 gigs of data through the magic of internet editing okay now you will see that that copy is finished and the photo library is on the sabaran xtreme q2 aka my external ssd now this could be any external hard drive this just happens to be not be the one i'm using you can see now that the photo library has been successfully copied to my external drive all you need to do now is go back to your original one make sure you're in the right spot check your home folder pictures folder that's normally where it ends up by default through mac os so all you need to do is take this particular file and throw it in the trash can and now that it's gone i'll go ahead and hit the delete this might take a second so i'll speed this up i'm emptying the trash can now okay you can see now the trash can has been deleted and i have 408 gigs left if we go ahead and open up about this mac and click on storage you'll see now that i have 400 of the 500 gigs available that large chunk of photos is now missing so there's one last step that we're going to want to take care of before we call this job finished the last step we need to do is open the photos app we are going to make sure when you open the photos app press down the option key on your keyboard and double click that that's going to bring up this ability to choose where your library is create a new library a lot of people don't realize you can separate your library so you need one for work one for home or say one for each individual members of the family you can create separate libraries you can choose from the list i'm just going to go ahead and say other library i'm going to point to where i put the library select that and press open it's going to take a minute to process the new library but once it's done processing your library your photos will be in place as you can see now my photo library is back intact the last step is the open preferences or press command comma and then it's going to display where your library is you can select show and finder if you want to see alternatively you can just open the hard drive where your photo library is located and just double click it and that should do the exact same thing as holding the option key again check the preferences and make sure it is where you want it located and you're good to go one other thing to check just to make sure you got it all is to click up in the menu on photos and you'll see this consolidate option if there's no way for you to click it then you know that all your photos are in the right place if that is not you can click it now and it will pull all your photos together to make sure that they're all in the photos library now we have successfully moved the photo library to an external hard drive in my example i do run it on an external ssd for speed but it's completely not necessary you can basically use any drive something like this western digital passports which are always on sale at costco uh any of the my books any kind of drive that you can find put it there now a caveat something that i will warn you of and again it isn't completely dangerous if you are using the full icloud library like i have a two terabyte icloud library it's okay but i do like to swap these drive out say about every three years i don't like to let them stay longer than that because the drive will eventually fail just from sitting there i also keep a backup copy on google photos and amazon glacier cole storage and my computer is backed up via backblaze backblaze automatically backs up my computer as it sits it also backs up all the external drives so i know my photos are safe i'm not really worried about losing them but again out of pure paranoia i let it go to icloud i make photos save them to an external drive also back them up to backblaze google photos and amazon glacier storage that is how you make sure you never lose a photo like it's actually i'm going to say full confidence that my photos are pretty safe so i hope this has been able to help you out i hope you don't do something bonehead like i did and accidentally fill up a brand new internal hard drive on a new computer but if you do or if you just need space in order to give your hard drive some more room to work move your photos library to an external drive now i will show you later how to ensure you do that for music which is used to be itunes but now it's music i'll show you how to do that in a different video so in order to make sure you don't miss that please hit the subscribe button please hit the bell so that you are notified whenever i make new videos also don't forget twice a week we go live with questions and answers you can just come in and ask your question and i'll answer them live on air that's tuesdays and saturdays and i thank you so much for taking the time to watch this i'll see you around soon i appreciate you aloha [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Doc Rock

Views: 430,926

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Id: 4WJN4hGSepg

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020