iPad Pro How can I have/use 4TB on my iPad Pro Photos app?

[Turnpike]

I have years worth of photos, many were taken during work projects, some of it text, some of design shapes, etc... since I took them with my phone, they're mixed in with years of photos, both personal and work and I'm wanting to find all those work reference photos and sort them out.

I've found an easy way to sort through them on my iPad Pro just using the Apple photos app, putting them all in a few different albums, and would love to be able to go through all my old photo dumps this way too, but my iPad only holds the 256GB or so at a time.

Is there a way (even with sloppy dongles, wires, external hubs and so on) that I can use my iPad with an external 4tb hard drive where it's similar to having a 4tb hard drive on the iPad, that I could put a lot of photos in the photos app at once? There are days where I'm stuck watching a machine run for hours (CNC, just watching for issues, almost never are any) where I could sort through thousands of photos with that time if I had a way to do this.

If anyone has a suggestion how I could do this, I'm very interested. Thanks!

 

[Madmic23]

4TB is a lot of photos. If you had enough iCloud storage space (like the 6TB plan), you could turn on iCloud Photo library with Optimize storage checked off and put all of your photos there. Optimize storage would keep a smaller version of the photos on your iPad so you could still review and sort them, and the full sized images would be stored in iCloud.

If you have a Mac, you could have a 4TB (or larger) HDD plugged into that, store your Apple Photos Library on the external, but with the the "Download Originals" option checked off. As you sort through the photos on your iPad and make changes to the albums, everything would be updated on the Mac as well.

The only issue with this plan is that the 6TB iCloud storage plan is a bit on the expensive side. However, you could just subscribe to that for a month or two while you're doing your sorting and then downgrade later.

I'm not sure if there is a way to use the Photos app on the iPad to view photos on external storage. You could probably browse an external drive and move files around in a different app though, like the Files app, but I don't think that's what you're looking for.

 

[sparksd]

It's unfortunate that the iPad system lacks a good DAM for management of a large library (I have tens of thousands of RAW & processed images myself).

 

[Turnpike]

4TB is a lot of photos. If you had enough iCloud storage space (like the 6TB plan), you could turn on iCloud Photo library with Optimize storage checked off and put all of your photos there. Optimize storage would keep a smaller version of the photos on your iPad so you could still review and sort them, and the full sized images would be stored in iCloud.

If you have a Mac, you could have a 4TB (or larger) HDD plugged into that, store your Apple Photos Library on the external, but with the the "Download Originals" option checked off. As you sort through the photos on your iPad and make changes to the albums, everything would be updated on the Mac as well.

The only issue with this plan is that the 6TB iCloud storage plan is a bit on the expensive side. However, you could just subscribe to that for a month or two while you're doing your sorting and then downgrade later.

I'm not sure if there is a way to use the Photos app on the iPad to view photos on external storage. You could probably browse an external drive and move files around in a different app though, like the Files app, but I don't think that's what you're looking for.

Yep, I think that's the best way to look at it. A lot of it is video as well, but sorting it with my finger while I'm waiting for a machine to run or on a plane for 8 hours, doing one photo at a time was what I was hoping for, but like you said, a computer is really the only way to manage a library of that size.

It's always nice to get input from the people on here, so I can know I'm not overlooking something. Thanks so much!

 

[Jonr515]

Yep, I think that's the best way to look at it. A lot of it is video as well, but sorting it with my finger while I'm waiting for a machine to run or on a plane for 8 hours, doing one photo at a time was what I was hoping for, but like you said, a computer is really the only way to manage a library of that size.

It's always nice to get input from the people on here, so I can know I'm not overlooking something. Thanks so much!

I don't have nearly 4TB and I have the same issue. (I use LRC)