Advice on iCloud Photo Library on external drive

[calabi]

Hi!

I'm one of these people that like to have a full copy of my iCloud photo library on my Mac! However my library is so big now and I'm looking at buying a separate external SSD and moving my iCloud Photo Library onto this by following Apple's process.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201517

Seems easy enough I'm just very concerned about data loss and causing any issues with my library. I'll take backups but i'm wondering in practice if anyone else is doing this and how they have found it?


I also plan to use a 2.5 SSD and put in a good quality caddy to give me some flexibility on the drive. Interested to know if people are doing the same or if people are using pre-made external drives such as the Samsung T drive etc?

Welcome anyones thoughts and experience!

c

 

[velocityg4]

I did it once as described in the article. No issues.

What Mac are you using? If it's got Thunderbolt 3. I'd use a USB 3.1 Gen 2 NVMe enclosure with an NVMe SSD. It shouldn't cost much more than USB 3 with SATA but perform a lot better.

Otherwise the DIY route just let's you choose the SSD. So, you know you are getting a good model SSD not a cheap one.

 

[calabi]

Thanks for the advice that’s good to know I’ll look into those, my Mac is only early 2015 Macbook Pro so I’ll just need usb3.

 

[velocityg4]

Thanks for the advice that’s good to know I’ll look into those, my Mac is only early 2015 Macbook Pro so I’ll just need usb3.

FYI, USB 3.1 Gen 2 is backwards compatible. You wouldn't get all the benefits now. But you'd get them on your next Macbook.

 

[calabi]

FYI, USB 3.1 Gen 2 is backwards compatible. You wouldn't get all the benefits now. But you'd get them on your next Macbook.

Thank you that is great advice, one last question I had how does the system behave if it’s the system library for iCloud Photo Library but say sometimes you don’t have the drive connected? Do you get errors while it’s trying to download the library in the background?

 

[velocityg4]

Thank you that is great advice, one last question I had how does the system behave if it’s the system library for iCloud Photo Library but say sometimes you don’t have the drive connected? Do you get errors while it’s trying to download the library in the background?

It'll switch to the internal library if you still have it. Otherwise I forget if it'll do a message or setup a new library and start downloading from iCloud.

Also you could do a 512GB Micro SD card. Getting whatever the fastest model is. Then use a flush fit Micro SD adapter for your 2015 MBP. Photos won't be as fast as off an SSD. But it's an option if you want to free up space and not have to worry about keeping a drive connected.

 

[rhyzome]

Hey—did you wind up moving your library to the external drive? If so how did it work out? My library is getting big and I’m thinking of doing the same thing. But I’m not sure what happens when you launch Photos without the drive connected?

 

[calabi]

Hey—did you wind up moving your library to the external drive? If so how did it work out? My library is getting big and I’m thinking of doing the same thing. But I’m not sure what happens when you launch Photos without the drive connected?

Hello! I haven’t done it just yet managed to free up some space to continue having it locally but I recon in the next 6 months I’ll need to revisit. How did you get on?

 

[rhyzome]

Hello! I haven’t done it just yet managed to free up some space to continue having it locally but I recon in the next 6 months I’ll need to revisit. How did you get on?

I didnt try yet either. However from what I’ve read there will be a number of issues, making it work seamlessly is more complex than one would think if your setup is not at your desk 100% of the time.

I’m now at the stage where I need to replace my computer and am leaning towards just giving in and upping my storage.

It is costly but honestly so are high quality SSD drives and afaik no external SSD drives exist with data transfer speeds that match Apple’s built in storage.

If you want easy sccess to everything and dont want to carry around drives everywhere it is the only solution

 

[calabi]

I didnt try yet either. However from what I’ve read there will be a number of issues, making it work seamlessly is more complex than one would think if your setup is not at your desk 100% of the time.

I’m now at the stage where I need to replace my computer and am leaning towards just giving in and upping my storage.

It is costly but honestly so are high quality SSD drives and afaik no external SSD drives exist with data transfer speeds that match Apple’s built in storage.

If you want easy sccess to everything and dont want to carry around drives everywhere it is the only solution

Really good point, to be honest I’m feeling like a fully loaded Mac Mini is the best route for me running headless just for photos and until then I can offload the oldest video files from my library to free up space!

 

[rhyzome]

Really good point, to be honest I’m feeling like a fully loaded Mac Mini is the best route for me running headless just for photos and until then I can offload the oldest video files from my library to free up space!

Yeah go for it! The minis go up to 2 tb I think iirc but in a few years 2tb will be like 1tb today—fairly common/standard.

The mbps already go up to 8 tb (of course thats excessive lol)

 

[Brian33]

But I’m not sure what happens when you launch Photos without the drive connected?

Hi! I have my Photos library on an external HDD on my iMac, and I have iCloud Photos Library enabled (but I also keep the full library downloaded to this library). It's worked great for me. I was curious, so I disconnected the external HDD and launched Photos.app.

I got this dialog with options to Try Again, Open Other, or Quit. I'm running Monterey 12.2. So IMHO there's no problem having the library on the external -- if you accidentally launch Photos while it's disconnected, you just click Quit. Hope that helps.

 

[calabi]

Hi! I have my Photos library on an external HDD on my iMac, and I have iCloud Photos Library enabled (but I also keep the full library downloaded to this library). It's worked great for me. I was curious, so I disconnected the external HDD and launched Photos.app.

I got this dialog with options to Try Again, Open Other, or Quit. I'm running Monterey 12.2. So IMHO there's no problem having the library on the external -- if you accidentally launch Photos while it's disconnected, you just click Quit. Hope that helps.

This is really helpful thank you! I might look at just getting a smaller drive then as the SSD costs are killing this for me haha.

 

[maconmac]

Hi! I have my Photos library on an external HDD on my iMac, and I have iCloud Photos Library enabled (but I also keep the full library downloaded to this library). It's worked great for me. I was curious, so I disconnected the external HDD and launched Photos.app.

I got this dialog with options to Try Again, Open Other, or Quit. I'm running Monterey 12.2. So IMHO there's no problem having the library on the external -- if you accidentally launch Photos while it's disconnected, you just click Quit. Hope that helps.

I noticed you say external HDD, not SSD. Have you noticed any performance issues?

I'm doing this on an old HDD I can reuse and would like to avoid having to spend a few bucks on a large enough SSD for the family Photos Library.

 

[Brian33]

I noticed you say external HDD, not SSD. Have you noticed any performance issues?

Hi! This is working very well for me, and I haven't had any performance issues at all. However my Photos library is not all that large (about 12,000 photos and 200 small videos, total size 41GB) and I have a fast connection to the HDD (Thunderbolt 2) so the throughput is limited only by the HDD's performance. A USB 2.0 HDD would be noticeably slower, but a USB 3.0 connection probably not.

It might well be worth a try for you.

 

[jmalc]

A note about .photoslibrary on external Samsung T7 SSD 1TB (1000MB/s up and down)

It works blazingly fast and I have all copies of originals on there. One hiccup though is I formatted AFSP ENCRYPTED (Apple's new file system for 10.13 and later). It shows up on startup and sleep quickly, but not quick enough for Photos which prompts me to "Try Again" to find the library. I tried installing Startup Applications app to delay it loading, but no dice. When you encrypt it, it saves the password into Keychain which I think may be the issue—might be doing that at Root level. Frustrating to have to click a button every time but don't really want to reformat as photoslibrary is 473GB and you know, iCloud!!!

P.S. Avoid the new Share Library feature on Ventura for now. After hours and hours of sweating bullets about my our family photos I have 12 years of photos back. There's tons of pitfalls, ex. leaving shared libraries is just as dangerous as sharing. That's why it's delayed as public release.