Your Photos library holds all your photos, albums, slideshows and print projects. If your library is large, and you want to free up storage space on your Mac, turn on iCloud Library and use Optimise Mac Storage, or move your photo library to an external drive.
Depending on your Mac, photo library size and other parameters, this process may take anywhere between a few seconds or minutes to half an hour or even more. 6) When the copying completes, hold down the Option (⌥) key and click the Photos icon in the Dock. Feb 17, 2018 iCloud Photo Library aims to deliver on the promise of having all your photos available on all your devices all of the time. To accomplish this, iCloud Photo Library works with Photos for Mac as well as with Photos for iOS and iCloud.com, as the glue that holds everything together. Sep 28, 2018.There are several reasons the size of your Mac Photos Library might be larger than the amount of space that you need to store your photos and videos: Your Photos Library might contain photos or videos that have already been added to iCloud Photos. Part of your Photos Library size includes small. 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 Library! This may take a while depending on the size of. Nov 09, 2018 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.
Before you start, make sure that you back up your library.
Prepare your drive
You can store your library on an external storage device, such as a USB or Thunderbolt drive formatted as APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled).1 Find out how to check the format of your external storage device.
To prevent data loss, Apple doesn't recommend storing photo libraries on external storage devices like SD cards and USB flash drives, or drives that are shared on a network.
Move your Photos library to an external storage device
- Quit Photos.
- In the Finder, go to the external drive where you want to store your library.
- In another Finder window, find your library. The default location is Users > [username] > Pictures, and it's named Photos Library.
- Drag your library to its new location on the external drive. If you see an error, select your external drive's icon in the Finder, then choose File > Get Info. If the information under Sharing & Permissions isn't visible, click , then make sure that the 'Ignore ownership on this volume' checkbox is selected. If it's not selected, click to unlock it, enter an administrator name and password, then select the checkbox.2
- After the move is finished, double-click Photos Library in its new location to open it.
- If you use iCloud Photo Library, designate this library as the System Photo Library.
Delete original library to save space
After you open your library from its new location and make sure that it works as expected, you can delete the library from its original location.
In a Finder window, go back to your Pictures folder (or whichever folder you copied your library from) and move Photos Library to the trash. Then choose Finder > Empty Trash to delete the library and reclaim disc space.
Open Iphoto Library
Open another Photos library
If you have multiple libraries, you can open a different one like this:
![Instagram Instagram](https://static.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/preview-resize.jpg)
- Quit Photos.
- Press and hold the Option key while you open Photos.
- Select the library that you want to open, then click Choose Library.
Photos uses this library until you open a different one.
![Library Library](https://i.stack.imgur.com/g0JPJ.png)
Learn more
If you have a permissions issue with your library, you might be able to resolve the issue by using the Photos library repair tool.
Mac Photos Closing The Library
1. You can't move your library to a disc that's used for Time Machine backups.
Mac Photos Library Size On Iphone
2. If the volume isn't formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or has been used for Time Machine backups but hasn't been deleted, this checkbox will either not be present or won't be selectable after unlocking. Delete and reformat the drive for this option to be available.