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.
Once the scan is finished, you'll see how much storage can you free up as the above first picture shows, use the Clean button to optimize your iPhone storage. Choose 'Optimize iPhone Storage' under iCloud Photo Library What Does 'Optimize iPhone Storage' Mean?Optimize iPhone Storage is a feature included in Apple's iCloud Photo Library that allows you to replace all your full resolution photos and videos with smaller, device-size versions. What does optimize library do on mac iphone.
Before you start, be sure to back up your library.
How to Delete iCloud Photo Library to Free Up Space. The iCloud Photo Library is great for backing up your photos across your iDevices and your Mac and sync them continuously without having to worry about anything. Until you hit your iCloud storage limit – free accounts get 5 GB of storage space – and wonder whether you should fork out a. Jan 13, 2020 Use Photos on your Mac. Photos helps you keep your growing library organized and accessible. Powerful and intuitive editing tools help you perfect your images. Memories displays the best images from your photo library in beautiful collections. And with iCloud Photos, you can keep a lifetime’s worth of photos and videos stored in iCloud. How to transfer your iPhone or Mac Photo library to an external drive. By AppleInsider Staff Wednesday, January 31, 2018, 04:40 pm PT (07:40 pm ET) Storing an entire collection of photographs in. May 07, 2015 If you’ve already decided to switch from iPhoto or Aperture to OS X Photos or Adobe’s Lightroom 6, you could trash your old iPhoto/Aperture photo library and use Photos or Lightroom’s new.
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.
Nov 09, 2018 Free up your space by transferring your Photos library to another external hard drive. By freeing up space you will have valuable space for your work on your Mac. In addition to this, we will help you to back up your whole photo library to iCloud. Why store photos on external drive In today’s world,.
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
- Quit Photos.
- In the Finder, go to the external drive where you want to store your library.
- In another Finder window, find your library. The default location is Users > [username] > Pictures, and it's named Photos Library.
- 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
- After the move is finished, double-click Photos Library in its new location to open it.
- 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:
- Quit Photos.
- Press and hold the Option key while you open Photos.
- 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.
How To Erase Everything On A Mac
1. You can't move your library to a disk that's used for Time Machine backups.
How To Erase Mac Hard Drive
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.