How To Move Your Mac Photos Library To An External or Different Drive

all right so today's video we're doing kind of a continuation a little bit of last week but i had some people ask this question i figured i'd get into it before and and we're going to get into it before we actually get into the photos app and start playing around with the layout and their organization and the editing et cetera et cetera so today it's real simple hopefully this is going to be a real super fast video all we're going to do is show you how to move your existing photo library let's say to an external or get it somewhere else because primarily your photo library sits on the main drive of your mac computer but if it gets large like mine does you may have a fairly small hard drive and it's taking up a lot of space if not pretty much all your space so being able to take that photo library and move it somewhere else can be hugely beneficial so let's let's go over here and take a look so this is the computer of course i got a bunch of external hard drives here and you can use any external hard drive really just make sure that it's formatted for mac so just go in and format it as what's called an hfs drive primarily usually that's that's all you need to do so what we're going to do here we're not even going to open it but you'll see here photos if i open it here's my here's my library that's great now the first thing to realize is that photos is actually two components right one component is the physical software and the second component is the actual library so the software and the library they work kind of hand in hand with each other so the software itself so the photo software has to reside on the primary drive we can't move that it has to live there but the library that's not the case so i'm going to close this again and of course if you and i were going to find her under applications this is where you and i i'll scroll down here this is where you and i would find photos there it is right there could i move that to an external well i guess in theory you could but would it function no it has to be there okay so we're leaving that alone but if we come into our primary drive so i'm gonna go under my user and i have mine under pictures right here you'll actually see my photo library so i have two photo libraries this is actually my my main one and i actually made a photo library here i'll just change the way this looks as icons right two photo libraries i actually just made this one here so that you and i could have something to play with so most of us are just gonna have one library just realize that and honestly all we have to do is take this this is the library and move it we just copy it so let's say i wanted it on this drive right here i literally just take it and go here now the one thing you can do is you'll see is if you do this you get that plus and the plus of course means that it is going to copy and that is highly recommended because if i were to hold my command key down you'll see the plus goes away and now it's going to do a move now the thing is or the issue is this is kind of moving so it's like taking files and just kind of moving them across and that library has to act as a whole it's like one big file with a bunch of files in it and during a move let's say something went wrong because let's say we're moving a really big file and halfway through we errored or we lost power or something happened well then the file that it's moving didn't finish so it could be corrupted and the file that it's moving from is kind of half half moved which means it could be corrupted which is no good so whenever we're moving or taking a program from one drive to another drive we should always do a copy not a move so we want to make sure that that little plus icon shows up right so you'll see the little plus right there we want that we're going to let that go now this is a small library with only a couple photos in it here she goes good old 50 55 megs that's going to move across awesome awesome awesome voila now before we delete the original one don't ever delete the original without verifying that the copy functions and all you and i are going to do is double click this this is the new one right this is the one on that drive double click we're gonna see does it open yeah it opens very good so that means it's make sure just go in here and check make sure everything's there it should be but you want to verify now that it's there we could come here and purge the original pop just command delete gone now if you want to verify again before you empty your trash can now you could go to photos without clicking click opens nice we're good because it's it's all linked right all length now the other thing you could do and we kind of talked about this in the video that came out last week is that if you hold your option key down when you actually click on the photos you'll actually get i'll just bring this over here a little screen that says choose which library right and by default it'll be the one that's last open so you could click on that and just verify or i could click on my primary whatever right choose that one and now you're you're verified that it's functioning but nice and easy there you go my friends if you are running low on space if you run a low on space on your primary drive and you want to move these to an external nice and easy the other thing to realize once you do that that external has to be plugged in whenever you want to use the photos library or you want to use another program that is referencing the photos library so for me for instance i mail a lot or i use final cut and i access the photos library that drive would have to be plugged in all the time big deal well it can be a little bit but it also means that we don't run out of storage here all right guys that's it short video today uh i think next one we're going to actually get into photos we're going to start looking at how it's laid out and how you and i can play with some of the organization all right we'll see you thursday i hope all right guys later you

Channel: Cruisn Canada

Views: 21,673

Keywords: photos, iphoto, apple photos, how to move iPhoto to external hard drive, copy photo library to external hard drive, how to move iPhoto pictures, how to move iPhoto photos, move iphoto to external drive, how to move your mac photo library to an external hard drive mac, backup photos on icloud, find photos in macOS, iPhoto new hard drive, iPhoto external hard drive, move iPhoto, backup iphoto library, iphoto library location, change iphoto library, move iphoto library, 2021, how to

Id: LUeY6UTelBs

Length: 6min 25sec (385 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021