How to move photo library to an external drive?

Last Updated :

Moving your photos from the photo library to an external drive is easy. But, it is highly recommended that before you begin moving photos, you should backup your photo library to any other location or a cloud account to make sure that if anything happens to your photo library, you have a copy safely backed up on to another location or a cloud account.
  1. To share your photo library, you need to move the library to a volume where ownership is ignored.
  2. Connect an external USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt drive which has enough free space to contain the library.
  3. Be sure to choose a locally mounted drive. Storing your library on a network share can lead to poor performance, data corruption, or data loss.
  4. Select this drive in the Finder.
  5. Choose File > Get Info.
  6. In the Info window, find the Sharing & Permissions section. You might need to click the triangle next to Sharing & Permissions to see the details for this section. 
  7. Click the lock in the lower-right corner of the Info window. Enter an administrator name and password when prompted.
  8. Select the option to Ignore ownership on this volume (usually selected by default).
    Note: If you've already selected this volume for use as a Time Machine backup, you won't be able to select the option to ignore permissions. Select a volume you're not using with Time Machine as the destination of your shared library.
  9. Copy your library to this drive. By default, libraries for Photos and iPhoto are located in the Pictures folder within your home folder.

Related Topics

95,000+ PicBackMan Users

95,000+ Users Trust PicBackMan To Backup Precious Memories

money back guarantee
Kip Roof testimonial Kip Roofgoogle photos flickr
PicBackMan does exactly what it's supposed to. It's quick and efficient. It runs unobtrusively in the background and has done an excellent job of uploading more than 300GB of photos to 2 different services. After having lost a lot of personal memories to a hard drive crash, it's nice to know that my photos are safe in 2 different places.
Julia Alyea Farella testimonialJulia Alyea Farella smugmug
LOVE this program! Works better than ANY other program out there that I have found to upload thousands of pictures WITH SUB-FOLDERS to SmugMug! Thank you so much for what you do! :) #happycustomer
Pausing Motion testimonialPausingMotionsmugmug
I pointed PicBackMan at a directory structure, and next time I looked - all the photos had uploaded! Pretty cool. I use SmugMug and while I really like it, the process of creating directories in is pretty laborious when you need to make 80+ at a time. This was a breeze. Thank you!

PicBackMan in an all-in-one uploader to backup & transfer your photos and videos to top online services.

Company

Important Links

Products

Help Center

All Uploaders

All Migration Tools

All Downloaders

Transfer from A to B

Copyright © 2012-2025 PicBackMan.com | PicBackMan, a unit of Better, Inc. 1600 Duane Avenue, Santa Clara, CA 95054