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. 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. 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. (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. If you're really hurting for space, I'd recommend turning on optimized photos with iCloud Photos for what you store on your internal SSD drive, and then keep a cheap large external HDD for the originals.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. The TL DR: here is that we get "taxed" 5-10% for much greater efficiency in speed in use and a lot of compelling features (non-destructive editing, Faces, Places, and other metadata based functionality). The remaining amount of data related to metadata and the database all is either needed for a feature (like Faces and Places) or general functionality. ![]() Technically, you could eliminate this if you really wanted, but the benefit to being able to go back and change edits is a pretty compelling reason to keep that data, combined with the degradation that would occur with repeated edits. The second largest amount of data is probably going to be related to non-destructive editing. Remove those and browsing your library becomes impractically slow as it ends up having to load in large image files and then render them at the size you're viewing at. I have a bit of insight into what this "redundant" data is, and what it would mean to remove it.įirst, a lot of it has to do with creating alternative views (thumbnails) of your images. or at least as similar as could be at the time on Windows. I worked with a startup many years ago that did something similar to iCloud Photos. My personal library is about 250GB and that has about 35GB of what you're calling redundant information. Your situation does sound very typical, if not absolutely average. ![]() The offending storage hogs are thumbnails caches and facial recognition stuff that Photos creates by itself! Trouble is, my Photos Library is beyond 46 GB! Photos clogged my SSD with 11 GB of redundant information, related to my own media! That, combined to Apple asking an arm and a leg for better storage options on its MacBooks, makes for a preposterous situation!īefore anyone says anything, I don’t have duplicated data, or edits. As of now, I have 35 GB of photos and home videos (as stated by iCloud and the size of the Masters folder), which I believe to be somewhat typical. Apple would do well to find a better solution to Photo Library.
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