Moving the Photo.library

[Speed38]

I am trying to help someone with a 2015 Mac Book with a 250GB drive running macOS 11.7.10 macOS.

She backs up to a Time Machine backup. She also has an iPhone.

Her internal drive is over 80% full and to avoid any potential problems, she needs to create some room by moving files off of that drive.

When we looked at Storage, we found her Photo library is about 20GB in size and moving it elsewhere would free up more than enough room.

Since I am dealing with someone else’s photos, I want to be extremely careful that I am giving her the correct advice, thus this post.

Method 1:
I know she could purchase an external drive, copy the photo library to that drive then delete the photo library from her internal drive. Whenever she wanted to view here photos, she would then have to attach that external drive to do so. BUT what happens when she takes a photo on her iPhone? How would she get that photo into the photo library on the external drive? I am guessing that if she launches the Photos.app with the external drive attached, iCloud sync will download those photos or videos she took on her iPhone into her library. Am I right? Also, using Method 1, changes to the photo library on the external drive are not being saved to her Time Machine backup so if that external drive malfunctions, any new photos she had added to the library on that drive have not been backed up by Time Machine. Yes?

Method 2:
She has sufficient room on her iCloud Drive to move the photo library there and then delete that library from her internal drive. If she does this, does this mean when she opens the Photos.app on her Mac, that it will seamlessly connect to the Photo library on iCloud Drive?

Using my own Time Machine, I opened a Finder window, selected iCloud Drive in the sidebar, selected a folder then went to Browse Time Machine and appears to me that TM is indeed backing up files and folders in iCloud Drive. Anyone disagree?


TIA.

 

[Ruggy]

Do you have something against using icloud instead of storing everything on a hard drive?
You are talking about buying another hard drive so I presume that's about $60 or about 5 years of using the cloud. Peope pay a fortune for a phone with a huge amount of memory when it's way cheaper and more convenient to just use the cloud.
Pay, $1 a month for 50Gb of icloud, load everything onto there. Back up your photos on the mac to a very cheap SD card- two if you like- then you have instant access from the mac and the phone and every new photo gets loaded to the cloud instantly. It also makes it a breeze when they eventually get a new computer.

 

[Speed38]

Pay, $1 a month for 50Gb of icloud, load everything onto there. Back up your photos on the mac to a very cheap SD card- two if you like- then you have instant access from the mac and the phone and every new photo gets loaded to the cloud instantly. It also makes it a breeze when they eventually get a new computer.

Many thanks for your reply and advice.

No. AAMOF, I would prefer to use iCloud drive, but I wanted to be sure I understood how to get her library from her internal HD to the iCloud Drive. After posting here, I began searching and found that apparently the way to do this is to open Photos.app > Settings > iCloud tab, be sure that iCloud Photos is checked, then select the radio button for Optimize Mac Storage. This should result in her Photo.library being store on the iCloud Drive and smaller versions of her photos kept in the Photo.library on her internal HD.
Does this sound right to you???