In Photos preferences, click the “General” tab, then look at the “Library Location” section. You’ll see the path to the Photos Library currently in use listed there. If you’d like to see the library’s location in Finder, click “Show in Finder.”. If you clicked “Show in Finder,” a Finder window will open that includes your. Jun 08, 2021 In the Finder, go to the external drive where you want to store your library. In another Finder window, find your Photos Library. By default it's stored in the Pictures folder located at /Users/ username/Pictures. Drag Photos Library to its new location on the external drive.
Photo Libraries tend to grow over the years, and sooner or later they will be too large to be stored on the system drive and we will need to move the library from our system drive. to an external storage. Do not move the library to a NAS or any other remotely mounted volume, and do not put it onto cloud volume (iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive). This will not work, because Photos is strictly a single user application and the Photos Library cannot be shared over the network.
There are only two safe options:
- Use iCloud Photos and keep the library in iCloud with optimize Mac storage enabled (Set up and use iCloud Photos - Apple Support)
- Use a directly plugged in external drive. The drive needs to be prepared as described here: (Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support)
Any other option, however tempting it may be, is currently (Photos 4.0 on macOS 10.14) not supported.
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Considerations when preparing the external drive:
How To Find System Photo Library
Location System Photo Library Greyed Out
We can move our Photos Libraries to an external drive, but the drive needs to be correctly formatted as MacOS Extended (Journaled) or APFS and locally mounted. (Set up and use iCloud Photos - Apple Support)
Photo Library Download
- Do not format the external drive for the Photos Library as case-sensitive, if the internal drive is not case-sensitive. A case-sensitive drive for the Photos Library can cause flag, if the drive is to be used from different user accounts or computers.
Why not use the Time Machine Drive?
You should not use the drive you are using for Time Machine to host your Photos Library, or Time Machine cannot back up the library. And since Photos 3.0 and 4.0 the the permissions may conflict with the time machine backup. See: Back up the Photos library on Mac - Apple Support
WARNING: If a Photos library is located on an external drive, don’t use Time Machine to store a backup on that external drive. The permissions for your Photos library may conflict with those for the Time Machine backup.
Occasionally Photos will also not be able to connect to the library again, if you want to open it a second time.
This user tip was generated from the following discussion: Where is it save to store a Photos Library? Requirements for the external drive
The previous version of this user tip is here: Where is it safe to store a Photos Librar… - Apple Community