My Photos library has become very large (750gb) and doesn’t fit on my Mac’s current HD, so I’ve started using iCloud to store everything. I’ve turned on “optimize Mac storage” and turned off “download originals”. This makes me nervous because now I don’t have any real backups and iCloud is only a syncing service.

I want to have a backup of my entire Photos library on an external HD (so I can use Time Machine), in a cloud service (probably Backblaze) and iCloud, but I am trying to figure out the best way to go about it.

I basically want to want to be able to:

  1. Still use iCloud so that I have access to all my photos on all my devices and have them continually synced as I take new ones. I don’t want to have to be connected to an external drive on order to view my photos.

  2. Have a local backup of all my photos that can be organized and contain all metadata that they come with normally. So that if I ever lose anything, I can get my photos back with all of their original data. Essentially, it would be great if I just had another Photos library, but locally.

So, here are my questions:

  1. How to do this with all my original photos now in iCloud and none on my actual Mac HD?

  2. Do I have to change the location of my system library? And if so, will I still be able to continue using iCloud and access my photos from my devices?

  3. What happens when I take new photos with my iPhone? Will that library on the external drive also be updated? How does it get updated?

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

  • ukfan140@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Based on this support article, you should be able to move the photos library file to another drive. You should still be able to use iCloud Photos with this method.

    I’m still new to Mac after not using one for years, so I’m not sure of a simple way of downloading all of the photos you already have stored in iCloud to the new drive, but there probably is.