Time machine help with photos and itunes

[Lilmishabear]

Hi...I'm new, so if this was already discussed, can someone point me in the right direction?
So my iMac died after 1.5 years...thank goodness I made a backup with Time Machine. So, because I have a smaller laptop, I'm trying to load things back and running out of space. However, I figured I might as well put my itunes and photo library in my iCloud. Is there a way to do that without first restoring it to my mac, and then uploading it? Can I do it directly from the Time Machine backup?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
LMB

 

[mj_]

You can't put your iTunes library in the iCloud because the iCloud will keep a local copy thereof on your MacBook.

Photos I'm not sure, you might be able to upload them using Apple's Photos app and then select to only keep thumbnails on your local storage. You will, however, first have to restore the entire library onto your Mac as there is no way to get it to upload to iCloud other than in Photos itself.

What kind of Mac notebook are we talking here? Does it have an SD card slot? If so you could get a Nifty drive or one of those Transcend adapters, a 128-512GB large SD card and restore your stuff onto the SD card instead of the internal storage.

 

[Lilmishabear]

You can't put your iTunes library in the iCloud because the iCloud will keep a local copy thereof on your MacBook.

Photos I'm not sure, you might be able to upload them using Apple's Photos app and then select to only keep thumbnails on your local storage. You will, however, first have to restore the entire library onto your Mac as there is no way to get it to upload to iCloud other than in Photos itself.

What kind of Mac notebook are we talking here? Does it have an SD card slot? If so you could get a Nifty drive or one of those Transcend adapters, a 128-512GB large SD card and restore your stuff onto the SD card instead of the internal storage.

Thanks indeed for the reply! So, the macbook has a 128 SSD HD, the iMac was at least 1 TB maybe 2. And no SD card slot...it's a 2017, so I have 2 US-C slots...pain in the butt, frankly. I called the Apple store...they said I had a few options...one, remove the HD, assuming it's fine, and simply use that as my new external HD, and sell the machine as parts. Or 2, buy an external HD and start using that for Itunes, Photos, and anything else I want that is storage-heavy...but yea, I have to first put it all on the macbook, then onto an external HD...argh!

 

[niteflyr]

1. If your iTunes library consists of only iTunes purchases, you can still stream or re-download all purchased material.

2. If you are going to use an external drive for iTunes and iPhoto libraries, first move your existing MacBook's libraries to the external drive. Here's how:

iTunes: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19507?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

iPhoto: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201517

Make sure everything is working fine with this new setup, then use Migration Assistant to connect to your time machine backup and move the iTunes and iPhoto libraries to the MacBook. It should copy them into the new ext. HD location.