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.

1. How To Delete Photos From Apple Photo Library

Why store photos on external drive

Here are two strategies that work in Photos in macOS all the way through Catalina that can help you assemble a list of images to delete from your library while maintaining more control. May 29, 2018  How to optimize the Photo Library. If the reason you want to delete photos from iCloud library is that they are taking up too much space on your Mac, you should try using CleanMyMac X to optimize your photo library first. CleanMyMac has a Photo Junk removal tool that removes files that your Mac doesn’t need. Dec 18, 2018  Part 3: How Do You Permanently Delete Photos from iPhoto Library. Actually, you can run Apeaksoft Mac Cleaner to delete all duplicate photos. Moreover, this powerful program can help you find and delete all duplicate videos, documents, music and other files. So you can clean up Mac and remove those duplicate items completely. May 07, 2019  Keep your finger in contact with the screen as it continues to scroll upwards, until all the photos are selected. Tap the trashcan icon in the bottom-right corner to delete them. How to delete iPhoto library on your Mac. Click on the iPhoto Library listing, and without letting go of your mouse or trackpad button, drag it until it’s over top the Trash icon on your. You can select (click on) the iPhoto Library, then right-click on your mouse or Trackpad (Apple will call. Mar 17, 2019  If you're using iCloud Photo Library, anything you delete on your Mac will also be deleted on all your other iCloud Photo Library-enabled devices, including your iPhone and/or iPad. Deleted pictures and videos can be recovered for up to 30 days (unless you have zero storage space on your computer), or can be deleted immediately and forever.

In today’s world, everyone loves to capture photos of every single moment and wants to save all those moments in his/her personal devices like Mac. But saving all your photos can fill-up your Mac storage quickly and you may face the shortage of space.

There are many options to store your photos data. One of them to store your photos on iCloud photo library but the drawback of saving your photos on iCloud is, if you delete the photo from your device it will be deleted from iCloud as well.

One question raised up here is that what we can do to store all our photos to some safe place if we are running out of space on Mac?

Fortunately, you have visited the right place to find the solution to your problem. There is a safer and easy way to transfer your entire photo library from your Mac to your external drive. The best of this trick is whenever you need to see your photos on your Mac you just need to open photo library app on your Mac it will automatically take you to your saved photos in external hard drive until unless it is plugged in.

Snapshot of the guide

There is a quick snapshot of the guide so you can understand quickly how to move the library to external drive.

I am in hell right now when I have to purchase overly priced crappy macbooks with their inferior operating system just because the clients who are too dumb to realize the obvious buy a Mac, and surprise surprise when the same presentation is created on a Mac and the fonts manually changed, the same fonts when sent to apple users work. Yeah, I’m amazed at how many of the apple users want “microsoft” to fix the issue, when in fact the fonts work great on every windows PC, but it is only the monopolistic, unconstitutional, evil morons at Apple are the ones “blocking” fonts from presentations or programs designed on Windows. Any ideas on what to do next?? I have restarted my computer (many times!) and I can’t find the Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Preferences/Office 2011 – it doesn’t appear to exist!!! Wow what a “coincidence”. Rebuild font library mac.

• Prepare your external hard drive to move Photo Library. Make sure drive is formatted as MacOS Extended Journaled.
• Go to the location of the Photo library and move it to external drive.
• Set the external library as a System Photo Library (So whenever you open the Photos app it will open the photos library from the external hard drive.)
• After completing trasfer to drive, make sure this external drive is connected to your Mac whenever you want to access photos.

Our article will help you to move your photos from Mac to external hard drive. Continue reading the steps are about to start.

Do not worry if you have already stored your photos on iCloud photo library. Our article will help you to get back your already saved photos in iCloud photos library and will help you to move them to external hard drive. Here is how to do it.

System Photo Library vs Other Library

When you run Photos app on your Mac first time this will ask you to create a new or use an old library. That default Photo library became the system library automatically. Only System Photo Library are allowed to access iCloud services.

You can create multiple other libraries and work with photos only in one library at a time. To work in another library you have to switch the library. You can also change and set one of the other libraries as a System library.

How to transfer the Photos library to a hard drive

First, make it sure the hard drive you are going to use for Photos library is faster and have enough space. It will save your time and stored your memories quickly. A good hard drive always keeps your stuff secure and there are fewer chances of losing your data.

Before going step by step to move your photo library to external hard, first make it sure that your external hard drive is already formatted for Mac OS Extended (journaled). If it is not formatted for Mac first erase all the data from it and format and choose the option of Mac OS Extended (journaled). Use the Disk Utility on your Mac to erase any hard drive (When you erase any drive in mac everything will be deleted, so please save any important data ).

1. Find the Photos Library on your Mac, it will be in your Pictures folder. Click the Go menu on the top and then select Home option from the menu.
   
2. Open the Pictures folder and there you will find the Photos library.
   TIP: In order to see how much storage your photos have taken, just Ctrl+Click on the photos library icon and click on Get Info. Now you can make sure that you have enough storage in your external hard drive.
   
3. It’s time to copy your Photos Library to your external hard drive using drag and drop trick. Now sit back and wait until copies over. The time of transferring photos depends on the size of your Photo Library.
   
4. When transferred completed, press and hold the Option/Alt key from keyboard and click the Photos app icon from Dock to open it. Keep holding the keyboard key until you see a window otherwise this will open the Photos app.
5. You will see a new window to choose the library. On that window hit the button Other library. Navigate to the new location on your external hard drive and choose the Photo Library.
   
6. If there is a message that shows “there are some items that need to be downloaded from iCloud Photo library” then you need to click on delete incomplete items and download all those incomplete items.
   

   Set a photo library as System Photo Library
   

   We have already moved the library to an external drive now its time to set it as System Photo Library. Doing that will allow it to use iCloud service.

7. Open the Photo Library from the external drive.
8. Click Photos men and then select the Preferences option.
9. On the next window click General and then click Use as System Photo Library button (this will help you to get it to work with iCloud Photo Library)
   TIP: Remember this is the step you need to perform in future If you accidentally unlinked the external drive’s photo library from the Photos app.
   
10. Go to System Preferences then iCloud then Photos then Options, and choose iCloud Photo Library to turn that back on. See if you have stored all the photos here.
    

Note: you will need to plug in your external hard drive in order to see your photos).

Delete Photo Library from Mac

Once you have confirmed that all the photos in the library moved to the external drive. You can delete the Photo Library from your Mac computer. Go to the Pictures folder and delete it to free up space from your mac.

How to back up your iCloud Photo Library

If you want to move all your photos which you have already backed up to your iCloud photo library to a storage device connected to your Mac. Follow our step by step guide above, but you need to download all the images from iCloud first.

If you have already transferred your Photos library onto the external storage device, now you need to follow these steps.

1. Open Photos on your Mac.
2. Click Photos then click on Preferences.
3. Click on the iCloud tab.
4. Choose Download originals to this Mac.

Now all your iCloud photos will be saved on the storage device. (If you are running short of space you would probably not want to do that)

No related posts.

Apple’s iCloud Photo Library allows you to store the images you keep in the Photos app on its servers and view them on any device linked to your iCloud account. This has two main advantages. The first is that it saves space on your Mac — instead of having full resolution versions of every photo stored on your startup drive, you have lower-resolution previews. The high resolution originals are stored in iCloud and only downloaded when you need them — for example, when you want to edit them.

The second advantage is that there’s no need to sync your photos with your other devices. When they’re stored in iCloud, they automatically become available on Mac, iPhones, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch, as long as those devices are signed into your AppleID and have iCloud Photos switched on.

There are several reasons, however, that you might want to delete photos from iCloud.

1. High resolution photos take up a lot of space and if you use iCloud Photo Library it won’t be long before you hit the maximum storage for a free account. You will then either have to delete photos or pay for an upgrade.
2. You may have photos that you no longer want anyone to see.
3. Some photos may be duplicates, or almost duplicates, of others.

Whatever your reason for deleting photos from iCloud, here’s how to do it.

How to optimize the Photo Library

If the reason you want to delete photos from iCloud library is that they are taking up too much space on your Mac, you should try using CleanMyMac X to optimize your photo library first.

CleanMyMac has a Photo Junk removal tool that removes files that your Mac doesn’t need. These include cache files for the Faces features, general cache files, and copies of files stored in iCloud. In macOS 10.12 and earlier, it can also remove RAW versions of photos.

To use it, first download CleanMyMac for free here and install it. Then do the following:

1. Launch CleanMyMac from your Mac’s Applications folder.
2. Choose Photo Junk.
3. Press Scan.
4. When the scan is finished, click Review Details to see what CleanMyMac has found.
5. Click Clean.

How to delete photos from iCloud Photo Library

Just follow the steps:

1. Launch Photos on your Mac.
2. Click Photos under Library in the left-hand sidebar.
3. Select the photo you want to delete.
4. If you want to delete more than one photo, hold down the Command key and select the others.
5. When you’ve selected all the photos you want to delete, press the delete key on the keyboard.
6. Select “Delete” in the window that opens.

The photos you selected won’t be deleted immediately. Instead, they’re moved to an album called “Recently Deleted”. They will remain there for 30 days and then they’ll be deleted permanently. In the meantime, I you want to recover them, click on the Recently Deleted, then right-click or Control-click on the photo you want to recover and choose Recover.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to wait 30 days, go to the Recently Deleted album, select the photos, right-click and choose Delete x items, where “x” is the number of photos you’ve selected.

How to delete photos from iCloud in a web browser

You can manage your iCloud library from any web browser by logging into icloud.com.

1. Navigate to icloud.com and sign in with your Apple ID.
2. Click on the Photos app.
3. Choose a photo you want to delete and click on it.
4. To select more, hold down the Command key and click on them.
5. Click in the trash can in the toolbar at the top of the photos window.

As with the other methods of deleting photos, the images you selected will now be put in the Recently Deleted album on all your devices. They will stay there for 30 days before being removed permanently. To get rid of them immediately, click on the Recently Deleted album, select the photos and choose “Delete x items”, where “x” is the number of images you selected.

How to manage iCloud storage

If you want to delete all you your photos from iCloud, you can do it from System Preferences on your Mac. However, you should be aware that doing so will mean — if you’ve been using iCloud Photo Library on your other devices — the photos won’t be available to view or edit on your iPhone, iPad or other Apple device.

Following this method will also show you how to delete apps from iCloud and how to delete data from iCloud.

1. Go to the Apple menu and choose System Preferences.
2. Click on the iCloud pane.
3. Uncheck the box next to Photos.
4. You’ll be prompted to download your photos from iCloud. Press Download — otherwise you’ll lose all your photos permanently in 30 days.
5. When your photos have downloaded, press the Manage button at the bottom right of the iCloud pane.
6. Click on Photo Library, then choose Disable and Delete.

Once you’ve clicked Disable and Delete, your photos will be deleted from iCloud after 30 days, unless you click Undo.

This method can also be used to delete app data, documents, and backups from iCloud. When you press the Manage button in Step 5, above, instead of clicking Photos click on an app to delete its data, Documents to delete files from iCloud, or Backups to delete iOS backups. How to find library folder on mac el capitan. Doing so, will delete all app data, documents, or back ups.

How to delete other things from iCloud

Documents and app data for iOS apps is stored in iCloud Drive and can be viewed on your Mac by clicking iCloud Drive in the Finder (if you can’t see it, go to System Preferences>iCloud and check the box next to iCloud Drive).

To delete app data from iCloud:

1. Click Options next to iCloud Drive in the iCloud pane of System Preferences.
2. Uncheck the box next to the apps whose data you want to delete.

When you next use those apps in iOS, any files you created or data for, say, saved games, will no longer be available to the app.

To delete documents and files from iCloud:

1. Click on the Finder icon in the Dock to open a Finder window.
2. Click on iCloud Drive in the Finder sidebar.
3. Navigate to the files you want to delete.
4. Drag the files to the Trash, then empty the Trash.

Deleting photos from iCloud is very straightforward, whether you do it on Photos in a Mac, an iOS device, or from iCloud.com. However, hitting “delete” doesn’t remove them straight away. Photos allows you 30 days to change your mind, while giving you the option of removing them immediately and permanently. If you want to save space on your Mac as well as iCloud, you should run CleanMyMac’s Photo Junk tool. If you have several hundred photos or more, it could claim back tens of gigabytes of disk space.

How To Delete Photos From Apple Photo Library

These might also interest you: