Photos and iCloud

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Level 1

9 points

Photos and iCloud

Hello,

I have been trying to organise my photos with great difficulty over the last few months. I have now got over 50,000 photos on my iPhone and Mac photos app - with all photos on one shared iCloud account (as well being backed up on external hard drive). I don't want all of the many old photos on my iPhone, plus I am also worried about deleting things by accident and losing the photo on all devices.

I am thinking about creating a second archive photo library for the more recent photos, and I would then use that as my iCloud storage too (and therefore make as my system library). I am just not sure how I go about actually doing this - do I deselect the iCloud on the first library and then tick the box on the second library? Will this lead to items being deleted? On my Mac I have the box ticked to download originals and on my iPhone I have the optimise storage box ticked.

I really don't want to do anything that will lose my precious photos. Just wondering if anyone has done before and can advise on how I can keep things organised without losing photos. Hope this makes sense.

Thanks so much,

Ellie

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on May 30, 2021 2:21 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

TonyCollinet

Level 7

23,954 points

May 31, 2021 12:05 AM in response to ellie903

No, you just take a copy of the whole library using finder:

Your library is probably called photos library.photoslibrary, located in the pictures folder (if you have renamed or moved it then you probably already know where it is). If you copy that (drag drop) to your external drive, then the whole thing is copied. Photos, albums, originals, edits and edited versions - everything.

You can open the copied library by holding down the option key while launching photos. You can swap back to the original album the same way.

You can see which library you have open (and where it is if not in the standard location) in Photos preferences.

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Answer 2

ellie903 Author

Level 1

9 points

May 30, 2021 7:11 PM in response to TonyCollinet

Thanks for your reply!

I did think about doing that at first but I have so many albums of photos on my current library that I would assume I would lose - not on the end of the world just a bit irritating.

In terms of creating the second (archive) library - I have read that you can export all photos as unmodified and then re import them onto 2nd library - is that would you did or do you mean you duplicated your library and then just kept the second copy on an external drive? (apologies if I have misunderstood). And if I did duplicate the photos library would it be as simple as just clicking 'duplicate' on the photos logo on my hard drive? That probably seems a much easier idea than exporting and reimporting all photos

Thanks again.

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Answer 3

May 30, 2021 5:01 AM in response to ellie903

Hi

I did exactly this.

What I did, was duplicate the library, so I had two copies. I moved one copy to a correclty formatted external drive (MacOS extended or APFS - use MacOS extended for a spinning drive, probably APFS for an SSD)

Since I intend for the archive library to have older images copied to it over time, I left it with all photos in it. I then deleted all photos older than 1 year from the main library, leaving it as the system library so those deletions were synced to iCloud and phone.

I now use the app power photos to copy over the oldest six months of photos to the archive library - every 6 months.

If you do this, make sure you have a robust backup strategy for both libraries

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Photos and iCloud

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