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Move Photo Library to External Hard Drive

I need to move my photo library onto an external hard drive so I can access my photos without internet without using up all my storage, however i'm wondering if i change the location of my library on my MacBook Pro will it make any changes to my Photo Library on my iMac?


Any help would be greatly appreciated!


MacBook Pro 13”, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jul 20, 2019 6:06 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 21, 2019 4:55 AM

The local libraries on your computers are independent of each other, unless you are keeping the library on an external drive and plugging it into both of your computers in turn.

As long as both computers are using a separate photos library, you can move the library to a different drive. Have a look at this document, how to prepare an external drive for a Photos Library:

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support


Have you been using iCloud Photos to keep your macs in sync?

If your Photos Library is syncing with iCloud, then moving the library to an external drive will result in a new upload to iCloud, when you enable the library in the new location again as your iCloud Photos Library. This will take again a long time.




1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 21, 2019 4:55 AM in response to Rhyannacrump

The local libraries on your computers are independent of each other, unless you are keeping the library on an external drive and plugging it into both of your computers in turn.

As long as both computers are using a separate photos library, you can move the library to a different drive. Have a look at this document, how to prepare an external drive for a Photos Library:

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support


Have you been using iCloud Photos to keep your macs in sync?

If your Photos Library is syncing with iCloud, then moving the library to an external drive will result in a new upload to iCloud, when you enable the library in the new location again as your iCloud Photos Library. This will take again a long time.




Move Photo Library to External Hard Drive

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