Uploading photos to iCloud vs. import to Photos.

[torbjornhb]

Hi
I currently have about 80k photos on an external hard drive, while my Photo library is only about 10k.
I have many times thought it would be nice to import the photos to my Mac so that I can sort them better with Smart Albums and get some control, but my MacBook Pro M1 only has 256GB.
Would a better solution be to upload the photos to iCloud? Would they then stay there, and just show the preview in Photos?

Thanks for all the replies

 

[RhetTbull]

A few ideas:

1. You could move your primary Photos library to an external disk large enough to hold all the photos and sync the library to iCloud. One disadvantage is you need to have the external disk always connected to the Mac.
2. You could import them all to the Photos library on the Mac but be sure to select Photos | Preferences | iCloud | Optimize Mac Storage. This will cause Photos to sync the photos to iCloud and only store a low-resolution preview image on the Mac (which will be downloaded automatically if you need to export or edit the photo). You might need to do this in batches to give Photos a chance to upload the photos to iCloud before deleting off the Mac disk.
3. You can have multiple libraries in Photos. If you hold down Option while opening Photos, you can create an alternate library. This library cannot be synched to iCloud (only a single primary library can be synched) but you could store the alternate library on the external disk and gain all the benefits of Photos for sorting and organizing the photos. I'd probably start here were I in your shoes.