You may choose to stash away all your photos – whether taken on your iPhone , compact , or SLR camera – on your Mac . This is a great way of making sure they are backed up , however , if you are a routine ‘ break down happy ’ , then your Mac store infinite can quickly run out .
One option is to use iCloud Photo Library to store full - res versions in the swarm , and lower - res versions on your computer ( as well as being capable to view them on other gimmick ) . But iCloud Photo Library is n’t a backup as such – if you blue-pencil a photograph that was taken on your iPhone it will be deleted from the cloud too .
So what can you do if you desire to keep all of your photos somewhere safe and you do n’t have room on your Mac to do so ?
Luckily , it ’s well-to-do to move the Photos program library on your Mac onto an external cause . Then , whenever you open up the Photos app on your Mac , it will access this drive and show you your photos ( as long as it ’s plugged in , of course ! )
If you want toback up the photos on your iPhone we have a separate article here .
Want to move your photos from your Mac to an external store twist , either as a backup or to free up space on your Mac ? It ’s easy , read on …
The operation here will be a bit dissimilar look on whether you already have all your photos hive away on your Mac , or if you have all your photos stored in iCloud Photo Library , but want to back them up to an external gimmick . We address both scenarios below .
If you are a bit curt of infinite on your Mac , here ’s how to transfer your photo library to an external movement and store it there .
How to copy the Photos library to a hard drive
If you have a enceinte exposure library on your Mac , transferring the photos to an international campaign can save you valuable storage space .
We send word you to get a reasonably fast external storage twist . If you have a large library a hard private road with a few TB of storage may appeal , but if you intend to spend meter using the Photos app editing the photo and so on , you may require to consider trice computer memory ( an SSD ) . Either way of life , we would advocate a Thunderbolt or USB-3 / USB Type - C interface for the fast transfer . you could check out ourguide to the best hard drive hereand ourbest SSDs here .
Before you begin , you need to ensure the external drive you are using is formatted for Mac OS Extended ( Journaled ) . Open Disk Utility and tick off what data formatting is being used . If you need to reformat the phonograph record , follow the footstep in this tutorial : How to format a magnetic disk for Mac . If the phonograph recording needs to be reformatted , you will involve to Erase the disk , so make certain you copy anything from the platter first , then penetrate on Erase and select Mac OS Extended ( Journaled ) .
How to back up your iCloud Photo Library
If you have iCloud Photo Library and want to back up all your photos to a storage machine attached to your Mac you may follow the usher above , but you will necessitate to tally the tone of download the persona from iCloud .
Assuming you have already copied your Photos program library onto the outside storage gimmick , you may perform these actions .
Now all your iCloud picture will be saved on the storage twist . ( Alternatively , if you do this step first prior to moving your photo program library to the outside drive , the images will be added to your Mac – but if you are short of storage space you in all probability would n’t want to do that . )
