Upload tons of photos to iCloud

[bennofatius]

Hi all,

I have old external hard drives full of photos and decided to upload them all on iCloud. I'm using a MacBook Air that is short of hard disk space. Here is my issue:

If I'm not mistaken there is no way to use Apple's Photo App to upload photos directly from my external hard drive to the cloud – all photos need to be saved on the local hard drive first. But there is no way I can do that.

So I tried uploading them using Apple's iCloud website. Not just that it's super slow (annoying but acceptable) but it's always that the upload stops after a few hundred photos (website is gone, some error – this happens both with Chrome and Safari).

So I was wondering if there is any smoother way to approach this? I was thinking some kind of upload client app for Mac but didn't find anything so far...?

 

[cynics]

In the photos app there is a Library Location area. While I never used it I image you might be able to target the external. If nothing else you can use the drive as a target and then import them.

 

[Shirasaki]

Simply build or move the photos app library to an external drive. Just change the setting in photos app.

 

[ezekielelin]

There is no upload client, but why aren't you moving it into Photos on your local machine? If you're uploading it to the library it'll need to fit eventually. If it can't fit, then you'll have to turn on Optimize Mac Storage.

I'd recommend turning Optimize on and importing them locally into Photos in batches.

 

[Shirasaki]

There is no upload client, but why aren't you moving it into Photos on your local machine? If you're uploading it to the library it'll need to fit eventually. If it can't fit, then you'll have to turn on Optimize Mac Storage.

I'd recommend turning Optimize on and importing them locally into Photos in batches.

He does not have enough storage on Mac to store all of them. And with lots of photos, even thumbnails can take several GB on top of all library database shenanigans.

A better solution is to attach an external hard drive and move library to that drive. Turning on optimised storage is a terrible idea for me because of the need of downloading photos from the cloud when needed.