Moving the Photos Library

satinsilverem2 said:

Im running 10.3 with the Photo's beta and I have a dilemma. When I first set it up I put it on a small 128GB external SSD. The drive has become pretty full and I'm tired of having to remember to plug it in to open and view my pictures. I want to move the entire library to my internal 2TB drive. I tried to just drag and drop the library folder but when I open Photos its only showing some of my pictures and videos. Am I doing something wrong with moving it? I really don't want to start over because Ive already set it up the way I want it.

Click to expand...

Once you have moved the entire Library, have you tried holding down the "Option" key when you click on the new Photos app? I am assuming it would be the same as the iPhotos. This should bring up a box and allow you to select the new location of the library.

Are any of the photos in the Photos Library referenced? or all of them managed, i.e. IN the Photos Library?

Also, I think that in the conversion process Photos creates hard links (sorta like aliases) to photos in your old Aperture/iPhoto library; those might go haywire if the library is copied. Note copied, not moved. When you dragged that library to your hard drive you were copying it, essentially creating new files.

Moving might produce a different result, but I dunno. I'd recommend against it until you find out for sure how it works, because moving and moving back might also destroy links. I would have thought a hard link would get copied and still point back to your iPhoto Library, but I dunno. They operate differently than aliases or symbolic links.

I would try this, and see if it works:

http://appleinsider.com/articles/15...ur-macs-iphoto-library-onto-an-external-drive

Did you load all the files up straight to your iPhoto/Photo library, or were they first put into a folder?

Also are all your pictures currently in the "Current" photos library?