Photos App, iCloud Photo Library

[rock15478]

I have a Macbook Pro that I use as my main computer. When I am at home it's connected to an external hard drive that holds my main Photos library. I also use iCloud Photo Library. I tell it to "Download originals" when using this so that I have a local copy of the full res files. When traveling or not connected to my desk, I'd still like to be able to use this Photos library but with "Optimize Storage" turned on. Is it possible to use the same iCloud Photo Library account but have two different libraries (one stored on my external hard drive for originals and another stored on my local laptop hard drive but with optimized storage)? How do other people solve this? It seems silly to have a whole other computer dedicated to just downloading originals but I'm obviously not going to maintain the entire library locally or I'd run out of disk space.

What do others do?

 

[mavis]

I have a Macbook Pro that I use as my main computer. When I am at home it's connected to an external hard drive that holds my main Photos library. I also use iCloud Photo Library. I tell it to "Download originals" when using this so that I have a local copy of the full res files. When traveling or not connected to my desk, I'd still like to be able to use this Photos library but with "Optimize Storage" turned on. Is it possible to use the same iCloud Photo Library account but have two different libraries (one stored on my external hard drive for originals and another stored on my local laptop hard drive but with optimized storage)? How do other people solve this? It seems silly to have a whole other computer dedicated to just downloading originals but I'm obviously not going to maintain the entire library locally or I'd run out of disk space.

What do others do?

You can hold Option as you open Photos, to create/choose a different library. Doing it this way should allow you to do what you want, although I don't think the optimize/full-res setting is library-specific (although I might be wrong) ... If that is indeed the case, you'd have to remember to change that setting before you opened the library ...