Prepare your external 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 (Journalled). However, you can't move your library to a disk that's used for Time Machine backups.
If you replace, the old account will delete and then replace the account on your new Mac, including everything in its home folder. Click Continue to start the transfer. Large transfers might need several hours to complete. After Migration Assistant is done, log in to the migrated account on your new Mac to see its files.
- He wanted to migrate his Photos library, but continue to use iPhoto. You can just copy a Photos library to another drive and delete the library from its origin, and iPhoto is unaffected.
- Old iPhoto Library is on an archive external drive, several years old. Plugged in the drive, and tried to open the iPhoto Library. Was told I'd need to migrate the content to be compatible with the Photos app now. On completion, I now see two Libraries of almost-the-same file sizes. Under 'Kind', the original is now labelled as 'Migrated Photo.
- Photos doesn’t copy the iPhoto images, but it uses a special kind of link that lets the same file exist in two places, avoiding increasing your storage requirements. Switch to Google Photos.
To prevent data loss, Apple recommends not storing photo libraries on external storage devices, such as 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 the triangle , then make sure the 'Ignore ownership on this volume' box is selected. If it's not selected, click the lock button to unlock it, enter an administrator name and password, then select the box.*
- After the move has 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've opened your library from its new location and made sure it's working 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 bin. Then choose Finder > Empty Bin 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 you want to open, then click Choose Library.
Photos will use this library until you open a different one.
Learn more
If you encounter a permissions issue with your library, you may be able to resolve it by using the Photos library repair tool.
* If the volume isn't formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journalled), or has been used for Time Machine backups but hasn't been erased, this tick box will either not be present, or won't be selectable after unlocking. Erase and reformat the drive for this option to be available.
Christoph Stork’s photo libraries are overflowing. He owns a MacBook Pro with a 750GB drive, but has an iPhoto library that weighs in at 190GB and a Photos library that takes up 250GB. His drive is almost full and he’s not sure how to proceed.
How can I know whether the pictures in the iPhoto library are also in the Photos library? How can I move a portion of the older images away while keeping the last few years on the laptop?
If you followed the steps to import your iPhoto library into Photos whenever you started using Photos, all of the library’s full-resolution images weren’t duplicated. Instead, Apple chose to use “hard linking,” which Jason Snell explained back in April 2015. Instead of creating a copy of the iPhoto media, hard links just allow the same file to be linked in two or more places. Unlike an alias, which has a special icon and just points to another file, the hard link reference looks and acts exactly like it is a file.
This means that, in this case, the 190GB and 250GB iPhoto and Photos library likely contain a whole lot of overlap. Thumbnails, modified images, and other internal data structures aren’t duplicated from iPhoto, and take up separate space in each library. New images imported into Photos would explain its larger size.
My suggestion for proceeding in this and similar cases is to get an external 1TB (or larger) USB 3.0 drive, which are relatively cheap. Copy the iPhoto library there before deleting it. (Deleting a file that’s hard linked in other places only deletes a reference; the original file remains in place for its other uses, so don’t worry about that.)
For as long as older versions of iPhoto continue to work, you can open any library on a mounted volume by holding down Option at launch, and then navigating to the library and selecting it. The same is true for Photos, although Photos continues to be updated, and should work across many, many future macOS releases.
If you want to archive part of your Photos library, get PowerPhotos ($30), a third-party app that has a lot of features missing in Photos. It will let you create a new library and copy images over, rather than using an awkward export method.
To find just older images, I suggest creating a Smart Album with the criteria for the date range you want, and then selecting all the images in the Smart Album and creating a regular album from it. You can then use PowerPhotos to create a new Photos library, copy that regular album and all its contents to the new library, and delete the album and associated media from your main Photos library.
PowerPhotos includes a license for iPhoto Library Manager, which has similar features. Both apps can identify duplicates within a library to reduce a library’s size if you have many images that were imported multiple times or duplicated internally.
I highly recommend making more than one backup of the photos and libraries you migrate off your main drive. It can be cheap to store data you don’t plan to modify at Amazon S3, or you can use Google Drive, iCloud Drive, or other options.
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