#PHOTO STORAGE FOR MAC HOW TO#
#PHOTO STORAGE FOR MAC DOWNLOAD#
#PHOTO STORAGE FOR MAC MAC#

It’s best to do overnight or when you don’t need to use Photos.

How long will it take to copy? Quite some time, depending on how many photos you have.

If it’s not, click the lock icon, enter an administrator name and password, and select the checkbox. If necessary click the triangle next to Sharing & Permissions, and make sure “Ignore ownership on this volume” is selected.

I got an error-what should I do? If you see an error telling you that you don’t have permission to copy to that drive, select the drive’s icon in the Finder and choose File > Get Info to open the Info window.

Where on the external drive should I put it? It doesn’t matter, but we recommend putting it at the top level so you are less likely to lose track of it in the future.

In the Finder, drag Photos Library, which is stored in your Pictures folder by default, to the external drive.To move your Photos library to an external drive, follow these steps: Plus, the drive has to be available, connected, and turned on (so you have to listen to it) for you to use Photos at all, which might be especially annoying if you regularly work remotely on a notebook Mac. This approach comes with tradeoffs too accessing images from a hard drive is slower than getting them from an internal SSD, and you have to figure out how you’re going to back up that drive as well. So it’s an option, but it has tradeoffs.įor most people with burgeoning Photos libraries, a better approach is to offload the entire library to an external hard drive.

#PHOTO STORAGE FOR MAC DOWNLOAD#

However, you may find Photos somewhat slower to use, as it has to download full-resolution versions of images you work with, and you won’t have a local backup of the original images.

#PHOTO STORAGE FOR MAC MAC#

In Photos > Preferences > iCloud, you can enable Optimize Mac Storage, which swaps the full-resolution images for smaller versions, saving a boatload of space. If you’re using iCloud Photos (previously called iCloud Photo Library) to sync photos and videos between your devices, the originals are all stored in iCloud.

#PHOTO STORAGE FOR MAC HOW TO#

(Don’t put it on a drive that you’re using as a Time Machine destination because there could be permissions conflicts, and note that Apple doesn’t recommend storing a Photos library on a drive shared over a network.)īefore we explain how to offload your photos, we want to mention another way of reducing the Photos footprint on your drive. If your Photos library has grown to the point where your SSD is nearly full, it might be time to think about offloading it to an external hard drive. SSDs are essential for ensuring optimal performance on a Mac, but because they’re expensive, many people don’t have as much built-in storage space as they would like.

Photo storage for mac