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Backing up more photos to an external drive

I created a copy of my photo library in my external drive by dragging and dropping. I deleted my pictures on my MacBook Air to free space. Now I need to free some more space and export more pictures to my external drive. Can I drag and drop my photo library to the external drive again to backup my new pictures. Will this add my new pictures or overwrite and delete my old pictures.

Posted on Feb 18, 2021 1:21 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 18, 2021 2:10 PM

Like me you have two libraries for space reasons (although for me it is iCloud space).


There is no easy built in way to copy images from one library to another. You can only export from one, and import to the other.


The problem with this - is you can either transfer your edited versions. Or your original versions, but not both. Actually you can do both as two steps, but then they will appear as duplicates of each other in the destination library.


The only acceptable (for me) solution is to use the app "Power photos" which can easily transfer images from one library to another, maintaining both edited and original versions, and nearly all orgnisation, keywords, and metadata. The only thing it cannot transfer is face/people data.


It also has other functionality (such as duplicate detection) - however, it is a paid app.

See:

https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 18, 2021 2:10 PM in response to Lar_Man125

Like me you have two libraries for space reasons (although for me it is iCloud space).


There is no easy built in way to copy images from one library to another. You can only export from one, and import to the other.


The problem with this - is you can either transfer your edited versions. Or your original versions, but not both. Actually you can do both as two steps, but then they will appear as duplicates of each other in the destination library.


The only acceptable (for me) solution is to use the app "Power photos" which can easily transfer images from one library to another, maintaining both edited and original versions, and nearly all orgnisation, keywords, and metadata. The only thing it cannot transfer is face/people data.


It also has other functionality (such as duplicate detection) - however, it is a paid app.

See:

https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

Backing up more photos to an external drive

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