How do you manage your Photos library ?

[FrenchPB]

Dear all,

I was wondering how you guys manage your Photos library or libraries with your Mac :
- do you have one giant Photos library or do you create a new one every couple of years ?
- do you have all your photos on your Mac or do you only keep the most recent ones with the older ones on a backup drive ?
- do you use a NAS to store your libraries and can you actually work with a library on a NAS (I'd expect this to be way too slow) ?

My Photos library is getting close to 1 TB and I don't know how to manage it. I also want to buy a new Mac computer but with SSD upgrade being so expensive, I guess I should go for less disk space in the computer and consider an external drive or NAS...

 

[cthompson94]

A combination of external SSD (Samsung T5 and T7), a NAS, and for off site backup B2 Backblaze.

I basically use Lightroom classic to build the folders and the structure that I use for the photos and the catalog for lightroom along with the "masters" are on the Portable SSD (I edit off the Samsung T7). As soon as I am done importing and and getting rid of for sure trash images like really blurry or totally missed shots I then copy the folder(s) by opening the SSD in finder and copying that whole new folder/images to the NAS which will get automatically backed up to B2.

Also, I create a new catalog by the year (not really a storage thing more on Lightroom Classics end, but I figured it would I would add that)

Edit: Adding after seeing @JimKas comment, for my iPhone photos and videos I also do "Optimize storage" and I do separate my Apple photo library if you will with the backup being the cloud with the 2TB iCloud storage for the same reason Jim mentioned because Apple Photo Library does not like multiple locations of things and that would be a nightmare. So to access my RAWs or whatever really from the NAS I just use the Synology photos app to connect to that from anywhere and it loads quite quickly imo.

 

[JimKas]

As of today, I have a single Photos library that contains about 58k photos and 4k videos. I have "Optimize storage" turned on for all devices.

Regarding NAS usage for libraries, I have a Synology NAS, and based on my research, a NAS is not "intended" to store an Apple photo library. I say "intended" because you can actually make it work, but as I've learned, you can corrupt your photo library if multiple people hit the same library file at the same time.

 

[Clix Pix]

I don't use Photos at all; I use DXO PhotoLab 6 for my image processing from my cameras and I handle my images independently of any software's catalog system.

 

[Ray2]

First I keep only images I publish (I do not use any social media). That means I trash near 90% of what I take. So I don’t have much to manage. I use Lightroom, 3 catalogs, all on a 2TB internal on an M1 Air. Less is more.

 

[mariostg]

Digikam photo library
Good old canon dpp to process raw.
Pictures keps on external hard drive from mac mini.
Rsync backup to external drive on Raspberry pi.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

I am going to say badly. While I have multiple back-ups, I still have about ten years worth that ned to be properly culled and certain images selected and put into slide shows.

The current digitization project of my 4x5s, could also stand a bit more streamlining.

 

[Reality4711]

Dear all,

I was wondering how you guys manage your Photos library or libraries with your Mac :
- do you have one giant Photos library or do you create a new one every couple of years ?
- do you have all your photos on your Mac or do you only keep the most recent ones with the older ones on a backup drive ?
- do you use a NAS to store your libraries and can you actually work with a library on a NAS (I'd expect this to be way too slow) ?

My Photos library is getting close to 1 TB and I don't know how to manage it. I also want to buy a new Mac computer but with SSD upgrade being so expensive, I guess I should go for less disk space in the computer and consider an external drive or NAS...

Badly.

 

[JamesMay82]

I have the same issue as you and my current solution is on my 2014 iMac

Lightroom CC with originals saved to an external lacie2big I do all my edits in Lightroom

Apple Photos Library which is mirrored with Lightroom and by that I mean any new photos get manually imported to both the Lightroom and apple library. This is also stored locally and saved onto the lacie2big. it seems wasteful having photo libraries in 2 different types of software but I mainly use both as their cloud back up gives me a redundancy.

I also have a 2015 MacBook Pro 15 inch and I have both my photo libraries on there as well but I just keep the optimised versions on this machine.

My future solution

is to buy a new MacBook Pro and get a studio display and get 2TB or more potentially so I can do away with the cloud and store everything on my laptop. The external drives I now have will then just act as back up to the laptop.

This is my dream set up but I just need to get over the mental hurdle of Apples SSD pricing.

The reason for wanting the MacBook set up is mainly to ditch the cloud but also im sick of being tied to a desk and external hard drives

 

[Ray2]

I went 2 TB with my M1 Air. Came from mini's and iMac's. With a laptop it’s liberating not having to depend (much) on an external for often accessed files.

 

[JamesMay82]

I went 2 TB with my M1 Air. Came from mini's and iMac's. With a laptop it’s liberating not having to depend (much) on an external for often accessed files.

Did you ditch the desktop completely?

 

[Ray2]

Did you ditch the desktop completely?

Yes and no. I traded in the mini as we're between homes and renovation is now in year 2. Once in I’ll pick up a used mini, run headless and use it for a media server. None of our Plex video content is on the Air. That’s 14TB without backup and there aren’t many Macs that can do that internally.