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Is there a "best" way to store photos on an external hard drive while maintaining the functionality of the Photos application? I have approximately 30,000 photos in my Photo library and would like to move them to an external hard drive to conserve memory on my MacBook Air which is approximately 7 yrs old. macOS Monterey 12.6.3 Memory: 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3.
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.6
30k isn't a large library. You're managing disk space, not memory. Moving a Photos Library is easy:
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
30k isn't a large library. You're managing disk space, not memory. Moving a Photos Library is easy:
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
When you are moving the library to an external drive, you will have to keep the external drive connected, whenever you are working in your user account. The drive should be mounted before you are opening Photos, or Photos will forget the location of your system Photos Library. And the background processes to scan the library will need access to the library, even if you are not using photos. Having to keep an external drive connected most of the time will be a bit cumbersome, if you are moving your MacBook Air around a lot, but the external will need a wired connection - do not even think about putting the library on a NAS; or you will open a can of worms.I would pick a small, portable drive, that you can easily carry around with your MBA, and include this drive into your regular Time Machine backups.
I would choose a high speed digital drive, rated at 1000 MB/s or faster. 1TB is about $80. You want pictures and videos to load quickly.
Thanks for the link to Apple Support. BOB
Photo library is very large, 30,000 photos. Looking for suggestions for external hard drive storage.
