
WARNING: To avoid accidentally deleting or corrupting a Photos library, do not alter the contents of a library in the Finder.

In addition to storing your unmodified original images, the Photos library saves their device-optimized versions, copies of edited images, thumbnails, previews, caches and other related items. Here’s what’s inside my photo library bundle:

To see what’s inside, right-click the file and choose the option Show Package Contents in a contextual menu. If your Photos library is managed-that is, “Copy items to the Photos library” is selected in Photos → Preferences → General-every image you import to Photos or drop on its window will get copied to the Photos library.īy default, the photo library is a bundle named “Photos Library.photoslibrary” found inside your account’s Pictures folder. In Photos, you can easily switch between multiple libraries but can only work with one library at a time. This tutorial will guide you through the process of moving an entire library of photos to an external drive, preferably to a much larger external hard drive, in a way that won’t disrupt your photography workflow.
#BACKUP IPHOTO TO EXTERNAL DRIVE FREE#
If you take a lot of pictures with a DSLR camera or your iOS devices and import them in Photos, you’ll fairly quickly run out of free space on most Macs. In addition to moving your multi-gigabyte iTunes library to an external drive, a significant amount of Mac storage space can be freed up by moving your photo libraries onto a separate drive.
