Nov 09, 2018 Free up your space by transferring your Photos library to another external hard drive. By freeing up space you will have valuable space for your work on your Mac. Related: How to Move Your iTunes Library to an External Drive. By default, your System Photo Library is stored in the Pictures folder on your Mac. If, like me, you take lots of pics, hard drive or solid-state drive can fill up easily, especially since more Macs ship with limited storage. However, you can move the System Photo Library to an.
Apple's iCloud Photo Library service works seamlessly to sync and back up your images and video across all of your Apple devices to iCloud — but if you're serious about keeping your irreplaceable photos and video safe, you'll want a redundant (second) backup. Because as they always say, you can never have too many backups! And it's better to be safe than sorry, honestly.
Backing up your photos can take the form of a local backup on your own drive or an external source, a secondary online backup, or both. Here's how to do it all.
How to back up iCloud Photo Library to your Mac's hard drive
The best way to back up the images and video in iCloud Photo Library is to make sure you're downloading all your content onto your Mac.
Copy Apple Photos To External Drive
Note: If you plan to back up your entire digital library to your Mac's hard drive, you'll likely want to do it on a desktop Mac with a 1TB drive or higher. Otherwise, consider backing up to an external drive.
Your Mac will now download full-resolution copies of all your images to your Mac's hard drive, stored inside your Photos app library.
How to back up your iCloud Photo Library content to an external drive
There are two ways to back up your iCloud Photo Library to an external drive: by backing up your Photos library automatically, or manually. (You can also export sections of your library if you don't want to back up the whole thing.)
Back up your Photos library automatically
If you've turned on the Download Originals option for your Photos library, you can back up your Photos library as part of your regular backup routine. Whether you use Time Machine or clone your hard drive using SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy, your Photos library (and all images and video automatically downloaded from iCloud) will be backed up as well. (And if you don't currently use a backup service, well... now's a good time to start!)
Apple Photos Library External DriveBack up your Photos library manually
If you've turned on the Download Originals option for your Photos library but don't want to back it up automatically, you can always copy your Photos library to an external drive at regular intervals.
Create an external library for backing up iCloud Photo Library
I recommend setting a bi-weekly reminder for these steps, so you keep your Photos library regularly backed up.
How to back up portions of your iCloud Photo Library
Don't want to back up your entire library? You can export individual images and videos to your external drive.
How to make an online backup of your iCloud Photo Library
Even though your entire iCloud Photo Library is (as the name implies) stored online in iCloud, it's worth considering a second online backup as one of your redundancies.
If you store your entire iCloud Photo Library on your Mac
Good news: If you already use a service to back up your hard drive and you've synced your full iCloud Photo Library to your Mac, it's easy to back it all up. (If not, consider it a good time to start!)
If you don't store your iCloud Photo Library on your Mac
If you don't store your iCloud images locally, this is a bit trickier: you can use the external drive method to export portions of your library to an external drive, then sync that drive to your preferred online backup service, but it's a bit more labor-intensive. In general, this is why I tend to recommend backing up your full library to your Mac or storing a library on an external drive.
Any iCloud Photo Library backup questions?
Have any questions about how to back up your iCloud Photo Library, or about backups or iCloud Photo Library in general? Drop them in the comments below!
Mac Backup Photo Library To External Drive
March 2020: These are still the proper steps to back up your iCloud Photo Library
Serenity Caldwell contributed to an earlier version of this guide.
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