Free up your space by transferring your Photos library to another external hard drive. By freeing up space you will have valuable space for your work on your Mac. In addition to this, we will help you to back up your whole photo library to iCloud.

• Move Photo Library To External Hard Drive Mac Compatible
• Move Photo Library To External Hard Drive Mac Computer
• How To Move Photo Library To External Hard Drive On Mac

Move Photo Library To External Hard Drive Mac Compatible

Why store photos on external drive

If you want to free up precious space on your Mac computer, then you can move your Mac's iPhoto Library on to an external hard drive. You can also move iPhoto Library to cloud storage service such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud Drive, Box and more. Knowing how to move photos library to external hard drive is important for your editing flow. It saves valuable desktop space and scratch disk memory on your computer. On top of this, using an external hard drive provides other benefits. How to safely move your Mac's iPhoto library onto an external drive. By Stephen Robles Saturday, January 24, 2015, 11:00 pm PT (02:00 am ET) Today's digital cameras and advanced smartphones like. May 19, 2019  To free up computer hard disk, we can consider to move Photos library to an external drive or other USB device, and load the whole Photos library from the external drive in Photos. This article will show the detail steps about how to move Photos library to an external drive and use it in Photos.app on macOS Mojave.

In today’s world, everyone loves to capture photos of every single moment and wants to save all those moments in his/her personal devices like Mac. But saving all your photos can fill-up your Mac storage quickly and you may face the shortage of space.

1. How Do I Move Photos Library To an External Drive? Hi Gary, I am using an older Mac with “only” 80 gig hard drive. Operating system is 10.11.6. When the conversion from iPhoto happened, my pictures took over my computer and I now have less than 1 gig left.
2. How to move your Photos library to an external drive. Save valuable space by moving your Mac Photos library to an external hard drive. Plus find out how to back up your entire iCloud Photos.

There are many options to store your photos data. One of them to store your photos on iCloud photo library but the drawback of saving your photos on iCloud is, if you delete the photo from your device it will be deleted from iCloud as well.

One question raised up here is that what we can do to store all our photos to some safe place if we are running out of space on Mac?

Fortunately, you have visited the right place to find the solution to your problem. There is a safer and easy way to transfer your entire photo library from your Mac to your external drive. The best of this trick is whenever you need to see your photos on your Mac you just need to open photo library app on your Mac it will automatically take you to your saved photos in external hard drive until unless it is plugged in.

Snapshot of the guide

There is a quick snapshot of the guide so you can understand quickly how to move the library to external drive.

• Prepare your external hard drive to move Photo Library. Make sure drive is formatted as MacOS Extended Journaled.
• Go to the location of the Photo library and move it to external drive.
• Set the external library as a System Photo Library (So whenever you open the Photos app it will open the photos library from the external hard drive.)
• After completing trasfer to drive, make sure this external drive is connected to your Mac whenever you want to access photos.

Our article will help you to move your photos from Mac to external hard drive. Continue reading the steps are about to start.

Deleting books. You probably feel the same way about books you've read on your iPad or iPhone.We'll explain the steps for clearing out the clutter of finished books using the Library tab, but you can follow the same process within a collection. Tap the Library tab.

Do not worry if you have already stored your photos on iCloud photo library. Our article will help you to get back your already saved photos in iCloud photos library and will help you to move them to external hard drive. Here is how to do it.

System Photo Library vs Other Library

When you run Photos app on your Mac first time this will ask you to create a new or use an old library. That default Photo library became the system library automatically. Only System Photo Library are allowed to access iCloud services.

You can create multiple other libraries and work with photos only in one library at a time. To work in another library you have to switch the library. You can also change and set one of the other libraries as a System library.

How to transfer the Photos library to a hard drive

First, make it sure the hard drive you are going to use for Photos library is faster and have enough space. It will save your time and stored your memories quickly. A good hard drive always keeps your stuff secure and there are fewer chances of losing your data.

Before going step by step to move your photo library to external hard, first make it sure that your external hard drive is already formatted for Mac OS Extended (journaled). If it is not formatted for Mac first erase all the data from it and format and choose the option of Mac OS Extended (journaled). Use the Disk Utility on your Mac to erase any hard drive (When you erase any drive in mac everything will be deleted, so please save any important data ).

1. Find the Photos Library on your Mac, it will be in your Pictures folder. Click the Go menu on the top and then select Home option from the menu.
   
2. Open the Pictures folder and there you will find the Photos library.
   TIP: In order to see how much storage your photos have taken, just Ctrl+Click on the photos library icon and click on Get Info. Now you can make sure that you have enough storage in your external hard drive.
   
3. It’s time to copy your Photos Library to your external hard drive using drag and drop trick. Now sit back and wait until copies over. The time of transferring photos depends on the size of your Photo Library.
   
4. When transferred completed, press and hold the Option/Alt key from keyboard and click the Photos app icon from Dock to open it. Keep holding the keyboard key until you see a window otherwise this will open the Photos app.
5. You will see a new window to choose the library. On that window hit the button Other library. Navigate to the new location on your external hard drive and choose the Photo Library.
   
6. If there is a message that shows “there are some items that need to be downloaded from iCloud Photo library” then you need to click on delete incomplete items and download all those incomplete items.
   

   Set a photo library as System Photo Library
   

   We have already moved the library to an external drive now its time to set it as System Photo Library. Doing that will allow it to use iCloud service.

7. Open the Photo Library from the external drive.
8. Click Photos men and then select the Preferences option.
9. On the next window click General and then click Use as System Photo Library button (this will help you to get it to work with iCloud Photo Library)
   TIP: Remember this is the step you need to perform in future If you accidentally unlinked the external drive’s photo library from the Photos app.
   
10. Go to System Preferences then iCloud then Photos then Options, and choose iCloud Photo Library to turn that back on. See if you have stored all the photos here.
    

Note: you will need to plug in your external hard drive in order to see your photos).

Delete Photo Library from Mac

Once you have confirmed that all the photos in the library moved to the external drive. You can delete the Photo Library from your Mac computer. Go to the Pictures folder and delete it to free up space from your mac.

How to back up your iCloud Photo Library

If you want to move all your photos which you have already backed up to your iCloud photo library to a storage device connected to your Mac. Follow our step by step guide above, but you need to download all the images from iCloud first.

If you have already transferred your Photos library onto the external storage device, now you need to follow these steps.

1. Open Photos on your Mac.
2. Click Photos then click on Preferences.
3. Click on the iCloud tab.
4. Choose Download originals to this Mac.

Now all your iCloud photos will be saved on the storage device. (If you are running short of space you would probably not want to do that)

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Do you want to move your pictures to an external hard drive to save space for your iPhone and PC, so that you can delete them, but still keep them somewhere else? Or you just want to back up your photos to make sure that you never lose them.

There are a lot of concerns when it comes to transferring your photos and videos to external hard drives. For example, sometimes media won’t transfer over properly and videos can turn into still images. What can you do to transfer your images the right way and avoid these problems? Let’s take a look:

• Method 1: Using TunesMate (For Win & Mac)
• Method 2: Using Photos App (Just For Windows)
• Method 3: Using Image Capture (Just For Mac)

3 Ways to Move iPhone Photo Library to External Hard Drive

Using TunesMate (For Win & Mac)

Now, how do you export photo library from iPhone to external hard drive? The easiest way to do this is with iMyFone TunesMate. This is a device manager that offer you a flexable transfer between iPhone and computer (as well as between iPhone and iTunes or an external drive).

You can take nearly any kind of data you want and transfer it to anywhere else.

• Backup iPhone photos, albums or photo library to external hard drive or computer.
• Selectively back up photos or other files without having to create a whole back up.
• Delete unwanted photos in bulk or photo library for free.
• Have the freedom to transfer data between device and computer, between device and iTunes, or even between two devices.
• Files supported to transfer include camera roll, My photo stream, music, video, audiobooks, podcasts, playlists ..

Steps to Move iPhone Photo Library to An External Hard Drive

Here are the easy steps that you can go through to export iPhone photo library to an external hard drive:

Step 1: Connect your iPhone and external drive to computer.
Step 2: Launch TunesMate. Head to “Backup Photos to PC/Mac”.

Step 3: Select your external drive and click on Select Folder. Then the whole photo library on your iPhone will be exported to your external HD.

If you want to selectively move the photo library, you can go to the top menu and click “Photos”, to select photos to backup.

Go to 'Photos Quit Photos'. Time Machine opens and shows all your available Backups. Click the 'Time Machine' icon in the Menu Bar and select 'Enter Time Machine'. Previewing photos library from backup mac.

Using Photos App (Just For Windows)

6. Open up the folder on your PC where you transferred the photos library with the file browser. Similarly, open up the main folder on your external hard drive using the file browser. Now simply copy the photos on your PC and paste them to the external drive. If you don’t want to save the photos on your computer, you can also delete them at this time.

Using Image Capture (Just For Mac)

Move Photo Library To External Hard Drive Mac Computer

How To Move Photo Library To External Hard Drive On Mac