

If you want to upload a set of media larger than your drive per above and then delete pictures and movies from your drive, you have to make sure that the Backup and Sync utility’s Removing Items preference is set to Don’t Remove Items Everywhere or Ask Me Before Removing Items Everywhere. However, one note of configuration warning with Google Photos: its deletion behavior after your Mac has uploaded media When it’s done, you should have a complete set of your images and videos, and can then take steps to shift to Google Photos. The iCloud tab in Preferences shows progress.ĭepending on your bandwidth, the download could take hours to days (or even longer) to complete. The next time you plug the drive in, it should resume even without launching Photos, as Photos has a background agent that manages syncing. You can interrupt the process by quitting Photos and ejecting the drive. Photos will now attempt to download all the media stored in your iCloud Photo Library to the external drive. Then choose Download Originals to This Mac. It may not be, because you switched libraries. In the iCloud tab, make sure iCloud Photo Library is enabled.Select Photos > Preferences and, in the General tab, click Use as System Photo Library.Click Other Library and select the copied library on the external drive. The library on the internal drive will be labeled after its file name in parentheses with “(System Photo Library)”.


When that’s complete, hold down the Option key and launch Photos.There’s no special procedure for copying, as macOS handles the library just like a normal file. Make sure Photos isn’t running, and then copy your Photos library to the external drive.Plug in the external drive, and make sure it’s properly formatted.The only method I can recommend is to purchase an external drive of 500GB or 1TB, which are fairly affordable with USB 3.0 support.
