Jan 01, 2018  The Photos library is 54,100 photos and is 222GB in size (all photos since 2008 and my wife takes a lot of pictures. When I opened it from the external drive on the 'new' Mac, it took about 30 minutes to open (was 'updating library'). Jun 10, 2010  The Best Way to Organize Your Massive Photo Library By Matthew Braga on June 10, 2010 at 1 p.m. For today's avid shooters, organizing a library of photos.

• Large Photo Library Mac
• Photos Library Mac
• Mac Photo Library Management

Your Photos library holds all your photos, albums, slideshows, and print projects. If your library is large, and you want to free up storage space on your Mac, turn on iCloud Photo Library and use Optimize Mac Storage, or move your library to an external drive.

Before you start, be sure to back up your library.

Prepare your drive

You can store your library on an external storage device, such as a USB or Thunderbolt drive formatted as APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled).¹ Find out how to check the format of your external storage device.

Aacs dynamic library per mac. Video doesn't allow me import to my mac library software. To prevent data loss, Apple doesn't recommend storing photo libraries on external storage devices like SD cards and USB flash drives, or drives that are shared on a network.

Move your Photos library to an external storage device

1. Quit Photos.
2. In the Finder, go to the external drive where you want to store your library.
3. In another Finder window, find your library. The default location is Users > [username] > Pictures, and it's named Photos Library.
4. Drag your library to its new location on the external drive. If you see an error, select your external drive's icon in the Finder, then choose File > Get Info. If the information under Sharing & Permissions isn't visible, click , then make sure the 'Ignore ownership on this volume' checkbox is selected. If it's not selected, click to unlock it, enter an administrator name and password, then select the checkbox.²
   
   
5. After the move is finished, double-click Photos Library in its new location to open it.
6. If you use iCloud Photo Library, designate this library as the System Photo Library.

Delete original library to save space

After you open your library from its new location and make sure that it works as expected, you can delete the library from its original location.

In a Finder window, go back to your Pictures folder (or whichever folder you copied your library from) and move Photos Library to the trash. Then choose Finder > Empty Trash to delete the library and reclaim disk space.

Open another Photos library

If you have multiple libraries, here's how to open a different one:

1. Quit Photos.
2. Press and hold the Option key while you open Photos.
3. Select the library that you want to open, then click Choose Library.

Photos uses this library until you open a different one.

Learn more

If you have a permissions issue with your library, you might be able to resolve the issue by using the Photos library repair tool.

1. You can't move your library to a disk that's used for Time Machine backups.

2. If the volume isn't formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or has been used for Time Machine backups but hasn't been erased, this checkbox will either not be present, or won't be selectable after unlocking. Erase and reformat the drive for this option to be available.

If you’re using the new Photos app on your Mac instead of the older iPhoto app, you most likely have a duplicate photo library floating around on your hard drive. For a lot of people, that could mean gigs and gigs of wasted storage space, especially on shared Macs with multiple migrated libraries.

Here’s how to check for multiple libraries and how to delete them…

Large Photo Library Mac

Before deleting your old library: Make a backup

While the Photos app should have imported all your photos and videos just fine, I always recommend having backups handy. Perhaps you’ll delete an old photo by accident at some point and want it back later. If you have a copy of your old iPhoto library still handy, you can pull it form there as a last resort.

I saved my old iPhoto library to my Dropbox account. You can of course use any service of your choice, or just drop it onto an external hard disk you have laying around. Regardless of how you do it, I’d highly recommend saving a copy before deleting it.

Once you’ve backed up your old iPhoto library (if you chose to do so), you can proceed with deleting it:

1. Open a new Finder window on your Mac.
2. Click on Pictures in the left hand navigation. If it isn’t there, just search for your pictures folder using Spotlight.
3. You should see two libraries, one is your old iPhoto Library and one is your new Photos library.
4. Move your iPhoto Library to your trash can and empty it.

Check the storage space on your Mac, you should notice that you have more storage space available. If you are on a shared Mac and have multiple user logins, everyone using the new version of Photos on that Mac should make sure they don’t also have duplicate libraries.

I’m not sure why Apple doesn’t create a process to delete old versions of libraries after migrating to Photos, but they should. Until that happens, you’ll have to delete your old library manually.

Use multiple iTunes libraries on Mac. You can have more than one iTunes library. For example, you could have a library of holiday music that wouldn’t appear in iTunes the rest of the year. Or you could keep your music in a library on your computer and your movies in a. It's possible to have multiple iTunes libraries, with separate content, on one computer. This lesser-known feature helps you keep multiple people's music, movies, and apps separate and lets you sync multiple iPods, iPhones, or iPads to a single computer without getting other people's music on your device unintentionally. Other options include using playlists and multiple user accounts. https://omgapt.netlify.app/more-than-one-itunes-library-on-a-mac.html.

Give this tip a try and see how much storage space you were able to clear up. As you can see in the screens above, my old iPhoto library was over 30GB, which was definitely a healthy chunk of hard drive space that I now have back.

Your Mac storage tips?

Photos Library Mac

This is one of many ways to regain storage space on your Mac without having to sacrifice losing data. But we know there are lots of others. Camtasia music files. What are some of your favorite Mac storage tips for recapturing space? We’ve love to hear them in the comments!

Update

A follower on Twitter referenced to me an article written on Six Colors pointing out that the library is actually hard-linked between versions. While this may be true when you first migrate, it seems that if you make any changes to any files and the libraries become different, splicing can and will occur.

To test this theory, I deleted my iPhoto library on my other Mac to see how much storage was freed up. For those wondering, my iPhoto library was 35.99 GB and my Photos library was 41.16 GB. You can see the before and after results on my hard disk space below. I was able to free up over 20 GB of space. So I’m not sure what I think about hard linking or how well it’s actually working between Photos and iPhoto.

Mac Photo Library Management

Bottom line, if you’re short on storage space and you want to free some up, there’s really not much point in having two photo libraries floating around on your Mac. Hard linking or not, deleting the old library will free up space in almost every case.