Mac Photos App Storage Options

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at all the different storage options you have in Mac Photos.

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Now the basic setup for photos on your Mac is to have just one Photos Library. Have that in your Pictures Folder and have that set as your System Library so it syncs with iCloud. You just put all your photos in there. Whether your needs are pretty basic or you have a ton of photos, like I do, usually that's all you have to do. But there are also a lot of other options. 

So in Photos, if you go to Photos Settings, and then under General the very first item is the location of the library that you're currently viewing. In this case I can see it's in the Pictures Folder in my Home Folder and it has got the default name Photos Library. I could show it in the Finder by clicking right here. It opens up a new Finder Window and there's my Pictures Folder and there is the Photos Library. All my photos are actually in here. It appears to be just one file but actually all of the photos are stored in there. It is a special kind of file called the Library File. Now you also notice that Use As System Library is grayed out. That's because this is, in fact, my System Photos Library. That means it is the one that iCloud will use. 

iCloud Photos uses a single library. So even though you can have multiple ones, only one of those on your Mac can be your iCloud Library. This is a typical situation that most people will use. Now since this is the iCloud Library let's look at those options first. I go to iCloud here, you can see under iCloud Photos I've got the option to have Download Originals to this Mac, or, Optimize Mac Storage. Download Originals to this Mac means that all of your photos, the original photo and all the data, will always be on your Mac's local drive. So you have 100% of your library local. In addition they will also be in iCloud and then any other devices like iPhones and iPads that you may have will be able to see that same library. If you turn On Optimize Mac Storage that means that while you see all your photos here as you look through the thumbnails if you actually go to look at a photo when you're looking at the full resolution photo if it is not cached on your local drive then it will have to load it from iCloud. Depending upon your connection this could be pretty much instant or it could take a few seconds. So you could flip through all your photos just like if all your photos were local but if you want to go and view one and see the details and edit it and all of that then it is going to have to download it first. Which photos are cached locally and what is not depends on the space you have left and how recently you have viewed the photo. So your latest photos and ones maybe you've just been looking at, they are all going to be local and you'll be able to go and view those without any additional downloading. But maybe a photo you haven't looked at at a long time may not be local, especially if you're short on hard drive space.

Now it is important to realize that if you're using iCloud Photos that all of your photos are on iCloud at all times. So 100% of your library is always on iCloud and all the thumbnails are always local. It's just the full resolution photos for viewing and editing that are cached locally and downloaded as needed. But if you switch to Download Originals to this Mac, then a 100% of your photos will be there all the time. This works great as long as you have a big enough hard drive to hold all your photos. 

Now let's look at some other storage options. The first one I'm going to show you still has the idea that you're just going to have one Photos Library and it could be your iCloud Library or it even if you're not using iCloud this still works. That's to go to this item here, Importing. You see the checkbox next to Copy Items to the Photos Library. If you turn that Off what will happen is the next photos you import will NOT be imported into the Library. But you'll still see them here in the list of thumbnails. So I'll drag and drop this new photo here just from the Finder. It's just a regular file. I'll bring it in and you can see now it is under Imports and if I go into my Library you could see it is right here at the top. I can go and view it and do everything I could normally do with it except that because it is local it will not be part of my iCloud Library. This one will just be skipped over. If I Control Click on it I can even see here show reference file in the Finder. Whereas if I click on one of these that doesn't appear because it isn't a file in the Finder, that one is inside the Library. So I can continue to import photos in now that I have this checkbox unchecked. They will not be added to my Library. Only referenced there so linked to from the Library and will not become part of iCloud. 

In general I don't recommend this option. It's too great of an advantage to have all your photos in iCloud. However, this can work well for a non-iCloud Photos Library. That way you can have all of your photos stored in folders as you want in the Finder and have a library where they are all imported in without this checked. So none of the photos are actually in the Library. They're external to it but you still have access to them all here in the Photos App. 

Now you can also create more than one library. I'm going to Quit Photos here and I am going to launch it again. But this time holding the Option Key down. Now here it is going to actually look for Libraries that are on my local drive. I can select one of those. So you can see here for this one it actually recognizes that this is my current System Photos Library. That's makes it easy to find that one again. But I have some other ones here that are old archived projects. I can also create a new Library, like that, and it is just like creating a new file. You determine where you want the library to go. You name it what you want. Now I know a lot of people will jump on this and say, great I can divide up my huge photos library into multiple libraries. But I don't recommend doing that because then it is very hard to find photos. If you're looking for a photo but you don't remember which library it is in. However, having another library can be useful when the pictures are substantially different than the ones in your main library. Like, for instance, say you're asked to attend a wedding and you are asked to act as the wedding photographer. So you take several hundred pictures that day and they are not really your pictures. They are not something you want in your library. You can create a New Photos Library for that. Store them all in there. Use that library for editing them, exporting them, but that is separate from yours. Then all you would do is launch photos with the Option Key held down and then it allows you to choose a library. So you can go to that other library open it up and work with it and then Option Launch Photos again and go back to your system library. 

When you create a secondary library like this it doesn't have to be in your Pictures Folder or even on your local drive. You could put it on an external drive and access it from that. Now one thing to note is that external drives are always slower than your internal drive. Even if you have an external SSD and you're connecting it by USB3 or Thunderbolt, it's still going to be slower than the speeds of your internal SSD. Apple puts really fast SSD's into their computers. Usually much faster than what you can buy as an external drive and then, of course, internally they don't have the bottleneck of the USB or Thunderbolt connection. Now, what is even worse is sometimes I hear people trying to put a Photos Library on a network drive. This is much slower than even a connected external drive. It may sound like a good idea but then try scrolling through your photos like this or going through each one very quickly just clicking through them like that. When that is on an external drive that's going to be slower. When it is on a network drive then it could be painfully slow. But if it is an old project and you are just archiving it and you rarely need to actually access it then a network drive maybe just fine. 

One last option I want to mention. You can actually have your System Library or your iCloud Library on an external drive. So right now the default is to have it there in your Pictures Folder. But if I wanted to I can move the to an external drive. Moving it is just as easy as moving any other file. I'll quit Photos here and if I look in my Pictures Folder there is that Photo Library. I'm going to open up another window here and then I'm going to go to my Archive Drive here, an external drive. I've got a folder in here and I'm going to call it Temp. I'm going to move the library here. Now because I'm moving to another drive it is going to copy the library there, which is fine. You can copy it there and will get a full copy here on this external drive. Then that I now see that it is safely there I'm going to drag my original library there to the Trash. When I launch photos now it's going to say it can't find it. So I'll say Open Another. It should locate the library here or I can just click Other Library and I'm going to go to Archive my Temp folder there. Open this one and there's all my stuff. If I go to Photos Settings and then I look here I could see that the library location is now on my external drive in this folder here. There it is! Now I can click Use As System Library. It will switch to it but it is the same library. So it is just going to take a little bit to sync up to make sure that is has got all the same photos and everything is the same. Then I'll successfully have moved my Photos Library to my external drive. 

This is not a good idea if you're using a MacBook because now you have to have that external drive always connected to your Mac in order to use Photos. It's a little easier if it is a desktop Mac because you can just have that drive attached 100% of the time. You don't have the problem of figuring out how to carry it around with you and always keeping it connected and using up more of your MacBook's battery because you have an external drive that is powered up. So I hope you found this look at different photo storage options useful. Thanks for watching.