How To Move Mac Photos Library

01.04.2020by
How To Move Mac Photos Library Rating: 3,6/5 3696 reviews
  • Apr 04, 2020  Go to System Preferences iCloud Photos Options. Select iCloud Photo Library to turn iCloud back on for your Photos. Disconnect your external hard drive and verify that all of your photos are indeed in the Photo library on the device. Once you are certain that the process is completed, you can drag the Photo library on your Mac to the Trash.
  • Jul 12, 2017  We click the the “Show in Finder” button and here’s where our “Photos Library” is located. We want to move it back to our user folder so Dropbox stops constantly updating. To move our Photos Library, we drag it to its new location, double-click it, and the Photos.

The last few years brought us so many advances in phone camera technology that it’s safe to say your iPhone — with three 12 MP lenses of various optical focal lengths — is more of a camera now than an actual phone (what was the last time you called someone?). In addition, new powerful processing chips mean that in-phone photo enhancements have now reached the level that was only accessible to the most powerful desktop setups before.

As a result, we take more pictures than ever. We record our daily lives on an hourly basis and require dozens of selfies to get that perfect Instagram shot. Combine this with increased megapixel count on each photo and you get heavy and overflowing photo libraries, which quickly eat up all the available storage space on our devices. And since there’s virtually no way to upgrade your phone storage, apart from buying a new expensive phone, people turn to iCloud.

Jan 05, 2020  If you want your Mac's photos to wirelessly sync to all your other iOS devices and computers, you want to set up iCloud Photo Library: Apple's photo sync service lets you back up your images on all your devices, as well as access them — online or offline — on said devices.If you're willing to pay for the extra iCloud storage space, you can store an incredible amount of photos and videos.

How To View Photos In iCloud

It’s hard to argue that iCloud is one of the best photo management solutions available to iPhone and Mac users. It offers cheap storage space, starting at $0.99 for 50 GB, native system integration, and convenient access via iOS, macOS, or web.

Essentially, iCloud is able to upload all your new photos in the background and make them available across your devices, thus offering storage, backup, and management features all at once.

Haven’t enabled iCloud yet? Here’s how to do it on your iPhone:

  1. Go to Settings ➙ Your Name

  2. Tap on iCloud and then Photos

  3. Toggle iCloud Photos to on (and My Photo Stream if you like it)

On your Mac:

  1. Navigate to System Preferences ➙ Apple ID

  2. Check Photos

  3. Type your password and click OK

However, even if lots of people do enable iCloud for their photo-storing needs, many of them simply dump their photo libraries there without any sorting or management, which leads to inflated storage costs and diminishes the value of this wonderful service. So here are some tips on how to select all iCloud photos, deselect them, delete all photos from iCloud, and more.

How to select all photos on iCloud

When you’re working with photos stored in your iCloud, you have to remember that it’s all online-based, hence some of your common and trusted shortcuts will work as usual, and some will not.

For example, you can’t right-click on any photos in your web iCloud to get a meaningful action menu. Similarly, if you want to select all photos in iCloud, you can’t rely on a menu bar command of Edit ➙ Select All.

Here’s how to select all photos in iCloud instead:

  1. Log in to your account on icloud.com

  2. Open Photos

  3. Navigate to the appropriate collection

  4. Either drag your cursor across the photos you like or use a shortcut of ⌘ + A

If you’re wondering how to select multiple photos on Mac, you can hold Shift and then use your arrow keys or click on the last photo you want to highlight. This will affect all the photos in a row. To select various non-sequential photos, you need to hold ⌘ and then pick everything you want by clicking with your cursor.

What do you do when you know how to select all on Mac? You might be interested in how to download multiple photos from iCloud, for example, which is very easy to do:

  1. Select all the photos you want to download on icloud.com

  2. Click the “Download selected items” icon in the top bar (looks like a cloud with an arrow pointing outward)

How to deselect all photos on iCloud

Knowing how to select all photos in iCloud is essential. But so is knowing how to deselect them — what if you select too many or just want to exclude a few you don’t like?

To cancel your photo selection, you can simply click anywhere outside of the selected photos. To deselect multiple photos in iCloud, hold ⌘ and click on the photos you don’t want to be highlighted.

How to turn off iCloud Photos

While iCloud Photos is a great option for managing your photo library, there are some cases where it might be better to turn it off. For example, when you have enough storage on your Mac and don’t want to pay extra or would like to find a better photo management solution.

To turn off iCloud Photos on iPhone:

  1. Go to Settings ➙ Name

  2. Then tap iCloud ➙ Photos

  3. Turn iCloud Photos off

To do the same on Mac:

  1. Go to System Preferences ➙ Apple ID

  2. Uncheck Photos

The best way to manage photos on Mac

While iCloud Photos is one of the most widely used solutions for your pictures, it’s hardly the most feature-rich one. The web-based interface is relatively slow, doesn’t support all the image formats, and doesn’t offer much in terms of organizing your library. If you feel like you’ve maxed out iCloud Photos’s capabilities, there’s another great app you should try.

Inboard is a brilliant organizer for your digital photo library, Pinterest-like inspiration, and even screenshots — in a word, anything to do with a visual medium. As a native app, Inboard makes it easy to organize images in folders with tags, so you’ll be able to find them in seconds no matter how large your library grows.

How to delete duplicates to free up space

No matter how diligent you’re about manually managing your photos, given how many new pictures we take every day, you’ll not achieve the perfect result on your own. Some bad images will still creep in, you’ll keep discovering duplicate copies here and there, and, what’s even more prevalent, you’ll have hundreds (if not thousands) of nearly identical pictures from various events — all taking up gigabytes of space on your hard drive.

Gemini is the perfect utility to keep your digital library in check. With just a single scan, it goes through every folder on your Mac and finds not only unneeded duplicate files but also images looking so similar that it would be a waste to let them all stay.

To use Gemini and free your Mac of duplicate files:

  1. Open the app and drop a folder (e.g. photo folder) onto its window

  2. Click Scan for Duplicates

  3. Go to Review Results

  4. Select Smart Cleanup when satisfied

How To Move Mac Photos Library To External Hard Drive

How to quickly transfer photos to Mac

It’s true that mostly people use iCloud Photos as a digital library, but some also like it because it gives them an easy way to transfer photos from iPhone to Mac. When you take a photo, iCloud automatically uploads it to the cloud in the background, where it becomes accessible by your Mac. But is there a better way?

AnyTrans for iOS is an all-in-one iPhone manager for Mac you absolutely need. Not only does it offer the fastest path for transferring images from iPhone to Mac, it also revolutionizes the way you’re able to control your media library, backups, apps, and even messages. Think of it as iTunes on steroids that is actually intuitive to use. And it has a built in audio and video downloader too.

So when it comes to figuring out how to select all photos on iCloud, or how to deselect them — it’s all easy steps. More importantly, you should know why you’re using iCloud at all and what benefits it gives you — because it might be a smart move to shift to something faster and native, such as Inboard, keep your library duplicate-free with Gemini, and transfer files in a snap with AnyTrans.

Best of all, Inboard, Gemini, and AnyTrans are available to you now absolutely free for seven days with a trial of Setapp, a platform with more than 170 better alternatives to the default Mac apps, from better wallpapers (Wallpaper Wizard) to better password management (Secrets). Try them all today with no obligations and see for yourself — why not?

A few months ago when OS X Yosemite was first shown to the public, Apple demonstrated its new Photos app. This app is meant to simplify photo management for all Mac users by emulating the looks and functions provided by the Photos app on both the iPhone and the iPad. This simplification comes at a cost though: when it finally releases its Photos app, it will replace iPhoto, its legendary photo management app that has been on every Mac by default for years.

This move will definitely be hard on a lot of users, especially those who, like me, got used to working with iPhoto for so many years.

Even worse: for most of us, our photo albums hold a huge number of dear memories, and as with every update, there is always the possibility of something going wrong when the time comes to migrate to the new Photos app.

With that considered, here are a couple of short guides on how to back up your iPhoto library both the simple way and the not-so-simple way.

Back Up Your iPhoto Library: The Easy Way

First, the good news (or bad depending on how you see it). In a very Apple way, in order to keep things simple and integrated on OS X, Apple consolidates your photos into a single, giant file that represents your photo library. But this file is not composed of just your photos, it also holds very important meta-data, like your events, photo stream shots and such.

To find your iPhoto library, open any Finder window and click on the Pictures folder. There you should find it.

To back it up manually and without complications, all you have to do is copy the entire file to any destination you want. It can be a USB flash drive or a portable backup disk if you want and that’s it.

Select New Folder.3. Click Select All.6. Open mac photos library pc. Skip to Step 17 if you don't use Photos.4. Open the Photos app and click Edit in the Menu bar.5. Type Exported Files' and hit Return.

Cool Tip: If you want to transfer your iPhoto Library to another Mac just plug your drive to it and copy your iPhoto library backup to the target Mac’s

How To Move Mac Photo Library To External Hard Drive

Pictures folder. Be warned though, this will replace your existing iPhoto library. So this tip is mostly targeted at new Mac owners or for those who perform a clean install of OS X.

Back Up Your iPhoto Library: The Less-Easy Way

If you want more control over what to back up from your library, there’s a way to do it that requires some digging around but that is perfect for that purpose.

For this, you have to head to the same iPhoto Library file within your Pictures folder, except this time instead of copying it, right-click on it and then select the Show Package Contents option.

Then, head to the Masters folders. There you will see several folders categorizing the different years your photos belong to.

When you open each of them, you will find folders for the different events, albums and dates that contain the photos as you organized them in iPhoto. There you will be able to select exactly what you want to back up and the way that you want to back it up.

And there you have it. Now you will always be in control of your photo library and most importantly, you will have peace of mind in case things don’t go that well with the new Photos app. Enjoy!

Also See#backup
#iphoto

Did You Know

It's estimated that people share more than 700 billion photos per year on Facebook.

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