How to export a whack of Albums and photos, and slide shows to an external drive.

[TimRichards]

I have about 11,000 photos, about 40 GB, of photos in my photo library which are from my work. Now that I'm pretty much retired I'd like to decrease the size of my photo library by moving these (in their albums folder organization) off onto an external drive. My initial searching on the subject has turned up several points which I am finding hard to believe. Point #1, exporting a group of Albums is not supported. Point #2, if I create another Photos library, where one can in principal open that library and import selected photos from the main library, (then delete that from my main library after verifying it has worked). EXCEPT this doesn't work if one has ICloud photos turned on. And, "Keywords are not imported". I have numerous slide shows, about 40, another fair bit of data, which I'd also want to move off to the 'work' library on an external drive. In the old days, when I was a PC guy, I'd just simply copy the dang files over to the other drive. Does anyone have experience on how to accomplish this task? Perhaps there is third party software? Thanks all.

 

[TimRichards]

Tim, as silly as it might sound, I think your best (quickest, easiest) bet is to simply buy an external drive and copy your entire photo library to it. Of course this doesn't provide you with the sorting out of all your old work photos, but at least you'll have a copy should you ever need to revisit them. Once this backup is copied and verified, you could erase them from the Photo Library you use on a daily basis. If you leave the new drive handy, you can easily open that library by simply holding the Option key down when opening Photos and select that old library. Might be an idea to give it a distinctive name like 'library as of ... date' and label the hard drive as well. The only other thought is that over time this old library format may become incompatible with the newest Mac operating systems, in a similar way that old old mac files are no longer easily accessible by today's systems...Probably you'll be very old by then, and won't give a crap. Good luck!

 

[chas_m]

1. Create a second Photos Library from within Photos, and save it to the external drive or wherever else you want it.
2. Once that's done, quit Photos, then open it again **WITH THE OPTION KEY HELD DOWN**. You'll be asked which Photos Library you want to use. Pick the new one.
3. Drag or otherwise add the material you want in that new library to it.
4. Switch to the original Photos library by quitting and relaunching with the option key held down.
5. Remove material you don't want in there anymore.