One big Photos library for everything or split into several to speed library up and avoid losing as much if it gets corrupted?

[-mattias-]

I currently have one big Mac Photos library with photos and videos from the past 15 years of my life. It has 3200 pictures, 1700 videos and has a size of 225 GBs. I have it stored on an external HDD, and then have several backups on other external HDD.

The library does not run that smooth anymore, and some videos takes a bit to load. I do not know if this is because it is run on a HDD or if it is because the library is too big? Have also been thinking about what will happen if the library becomes corrupted (don't know why it should, though). Should I consider splitting the libraries up into maybe 5 years per library to make them run faster and to avoid losing as much if one were to get corrupted, or is this not necessary condering the size and all of it? Because I would rather not have to split the one library I have.

 

[Fruehling]

I wouldn't split up the library. If your library is corrupted, you restore from one of your backups. The advantage of having one unified library is to be able to search through all your pictures, including faces/ people across time. It's also cumbersome to juggle different libraries.

Maybe a switch to an external SDD would speed things up. You can also try using iCloud Photo library but good luck with uploading 225 GB... Uploading and curating my only 90GB-sized library took ages.

Another tip: Resize your videos to HEVC. It saves disk-space big time. I've followed this workflow by this Dutch guy using Permute to resize the videos and reimport them (keeping the metadata, but losing their association with albums). Worked quite well!