Installing photo library with original photos on a second apple device (iMac)

Hello Pomme,

On your iMac I would create a new, empty iCloud Photos Library on your new external drive. It would take much longer to use a copy of the library from the MacBook Air, because it would require a new, lengthy upload to iCloud and merging the copy into the existing iCloud library. It might even not be possible, because you would need enough free cloud storage to upload the copy of the library again, in addition to the photos already there in iCloud.

• Prepare the new drive exactly as described here: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
• Then launch Photos on your iMac while holding down the options key ⌥ to bring up the Library Chooser dialog and select to create a new, empty library on your new drive.
• When Photos opens on the new library make it your system photos library.
• Then enable iCloud Photos and "download originals".
• Now wait for the download to finish. It may take more than a week for such a large library, perhaps even longer.

Starting with a new, empty library will download the library as it is now in iCloud, all media, albums, folders and meta data. The only thing missing will be the projects, because they are not syncing with iCloud. And some manually added faces may be missing.

léonie

P0mme,

I've had reason to go through this same procedure twice recently, once to populate the Photos library on a new Mac mini and again to replace a damaged library on an iMac. My library has more items (over 103K photos and about 2K small videos) but is less than half the volume of yours.

On a nominal 1Gbit/second fiber line, the structure of the library and most of the working contents came through in a couple of days, but then the download switched into a more extended period of downloading the "Originals" (the full resolution copies) at a more -ahem- leisurely pace. (The status line switched to "Downloading xxx Originals" or variants thereof.)

I would be interested to hear whether your large download proceeds in this same two-phase manner and what sort of download speed you see in the latter phase.

I would be interested to hear whether your large download proceeds in this same two-phase manner and what sort of download speed you see in the latter phase.

A very good question, Mark.

I would like to hear that too. When I am downloading my library from iCloud (currently 83000 items) the second phase is taking usually a very long time. I can work with the library very soon after setting up iCloud Photos, but Photos is dragging its feet over downloading the originals. When I want to be sure that all originals have been downloaded I am forcing a download by exporting all originals.

You're welcome, POmme. Good Luck! 😊