- How To Backup Photos App On Mac To External Hard Drive
- Macbook Pro External Hard Drive
- How To Copy Photos From Mac Photo App To External Hard Drive
Alternative ways to recover data from an external hard drive. Reset the System Management Controller (SMC) if your Mac shuts down when you plug in an external hard drive. Then use a different port to connect the external hard drive. If you’ve got a battery that you can’t remove: Shut down and unplug the power adapter. This is a great external hard drive for your Mac if you are concerned about keeping your data safe and secure. Western Digital My Passport Ultra features cloud storage and 256-AES encryption. Connect the device to your Mac. In Photos, choose File Import, then select the items you want and click Review for Import. To set where to import the items, click the “Import to” pop-up menu and choose a location. If you selected a folder that contains other folders, choose Library (you can’t import a group of folders into an album).
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). However, you can't move your library to a disk that's used for Time Machine backups. 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 the triangle button , then make sure the 'Ignore ownership on this volume' checkbox is selected. If it's not selected, click the lock button to unlock it, enter an administrator name and password, then select the checkbox.*
- 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 disk space.
Open another Photos library
If you have multiple libraries, here's how to open a different one:
- 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.
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.
* If the volume isn't formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or has been used for Time Machine backups but hasn't been erased, this checkbox will either not be present, or won't be selectable after unlocking. Erase and reformat the drive for this option to be available.
Successfully created a new photo library for Photos.app on a flash drive formatted as ExFAT
How To Backup Photos App On Mac To External Hard Drive
Creating a library on any drive is easy. That's not the point. If the library is on a drive that is not correctly formatted then you will have issues with the library and risk dataloss through database corruption, as well as issues sharing and integrating with other apps.
See this article:
and note particularly:
Macbook Pro External Hard 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.
How To Copy Photos From Mac Photo App To External Hard Drive
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.