Photos app bogged down

[adgjqetuo]

So I’m new to Mac but not iPhone - bought my first iMac recently.

All my photos are on a newer 4TB HDD (around 35k photos or so). They are categorized by year and album.

Due to the size, I created a photo app file on the same HDD and tried importing them into the app. It got half way through and then the program stopped responding. I did a hard reset, let the HDD rest for a while and tried to finish the rest but it just seems laggy.

Am I using this app incorrectly? Should I just stick to my file system instead? I’m not familiar with the app however I liked some of its features which is why I tried importing my full library to it.

Also, is there a way to direct the app to link directly to my external instead of using double space and importing all of my photos onto the same HDD?

2017 iMac 3.8 / 40GB ram

 

[HDFan]

I created a photo app file

Are you talking about Apple Photos and creating an Apple Photos library?

 

[johandup]

Before doing stuff like this you need to backup to a different hard drive.
I’ve lost photos on a synology 1415+ as well as a lacie (which worked of a imac and macbook pro only - drive was corrupted. Lots of problems like this reported on sierra forums)
I’ve stopped trusting Apple products.
Photo backups need to be in 2 seperate places.
You also need to have a hardware monitoring system in place running in the background at all times.