Best Option Long Term Photo Storage

[IWT]

@timkins

If I understand your situation correctly, most, if not all your pictures are in the Photos app and therein, organised into Albums and possibly Folders?

So you want a safe backup of all of these, keeping the Albums, Folders structure.

Rather than Drop/Drag or Copy/Paste why not create a copy of your Photos App Library on the SSD?

Your Photos App Library can be found in this way:

Open Finder. In the Sidebar on the Left, Click on Macintosh HD, then Click on Users, > Your Name > Pictures > and your Library is shown as: "Photos Library.photoslibrary".

Click on it to Highlight it. Then Command C to Copy. Then Click on your SSD which should show up in the Sidebar on the left to open it. Then Command V to paste the Library to the SSD.

When finished - be patient - that will be an exact copy including whatever Album/Folder organisation you have in the Photos app.

You also said:

My ultimate goal is to export these files to an external SSD for safe keeping other than stored on my computer and the cloud.

OK. So now you have a Photos App Library on the Mac and one on the SSD. All you have to do now is direct your Photos app on the Mac to the Library on the SSD.

To do this - Hold down the option (or alt) key and launch Photos. From the resulting menu select “Other Library” and navigate to the new location on your SSD.

Now make sure that all is well on the SSD. Once confirmed, you can delete the Photos Library on the Mac.

What I don't know is whether ALL your pictures are in the Photos app - or are other pictures scattered around your Mac in different locations?

Ian

 

[MacInWin]

Whilst typing this I see Ian has commented about moving the entire photos library. IF that is what you want, you can follow his instructions, but I'm going to post what I have written because if what you want is to get the separate picture files back out of Photos, that process won't do it. One thing I might mention is that he assumes your system is at the default for Photos. You can see where YOUR photoslibrary file is by opening Photos, Click on "Photos" in the upper left corner of the screen, then Preferences and on the General tab the first item will be the "Library Location" that shows the entire path to your library. There is even a "Show in Finder" button to get you directly there to do the rest of what Ian suggested. One other note is that Ian has assumed you just want to move the Photos library off the internal drive, while I am assuming you want another copy of your pictures as a backup. You should note that the photos library file is just a file like any other and can be backed up by Time Machine or the cloners most folks use.

OK, first I'd like to get some terminology straight so we can communicate better. It may seem a bit pedantic, but words and definitions are important.

A "file" is a collection of data, stored together for some reason. In this case, a "file" would hold one image and would typically have a name like "IMG_3203.JPG" or perhaps something different if you changed the name for any reason.

Files get stored in "Folders," much like you might store printed pictures in file folders in a file cabinet. You can then work with one file, or the whole folder, just as you can take out one picture from the paper folder, or take the entire folder with you.

OK, so in the application Photos (to keep it straight, the term "Photos" or "photos" will ONLY be used for the app, not the images or files) you can store the files that have images in them, then organize them within Photos into Albums that show in the left sidebar of Photos. The actual files are all in a database that is part of the Photos library and which is stored at the location you can see in Photos preferences. What Photos does is to keep the original intact, then records all edits and changes you may make to the image. When you bring the image forward, it applies all of the changes to the original again to display to you. That is how it works so that if you ever want the original back, you can get back to it. I'm not going to go into a tutorial on Photos, there are lots of help online, and there is a complete user guide at Apple.com here: Photos User Guide for Mac

One thing in Photos are Albums, which are collections of images grouped any way you want. Any given image can be in one or more Albums, or in none. EVERY image is in the library, but not every image is in an Album, unless you put it there I think what you called files (the 198) are actually albums. Any given image can be in any Album. For example, let's say you have a picture of your friend Betty in front of Buckingham Palace that you took in 2016. You might want that image in the Album named "Betty" that has all of the pictures in which Betty appears, in the Album named "England 2016" that has all the pictures from the trip whether Betty is in them or not, in the Album named "2016" for all the pictures you took in 2016, and maybe even in an Album named "Palaces" which is a collection of the various palaces around the world you have seen. But the app Photos doesn't make four copies of the file with the picture, it just notes that the file is associated with all of those Albums. So, you can delete an image from an album in Photos and still keep the original image file. Again, I'm going into all the details of how that works, just want to explain what you are seeing in Photos.

So, now you want to export, let's say, the images in "Palaces" to an external drive in a folder named "Palaces" there. To do that, create the folder on the drive first, using Finder. Then open Photos, open the Album named "Palaces" and select all of the images. Then click on the top bar "File" and "Export" and you will be given an opportunity to export the files with the images out of Photos. Note that you can export either the images as you have edited them, or as they were originally imported, without the edits you have made. You will be given a chance to say where to put the files, at which time you select the folder named "Palaces" on the external drive and let the process run. The files stored in Photos will now be exported to that location as you have instructed the system. Note, if you do that process for every Album in Photos and if the picture of Betty in front of Buckingham Palace in 2016 is shown in four Albums, you will end up with four copies of that file in four different folders on the external drive.

Ian is the expert here on Photos, and if all you want is a backup of your Photos library as it is, then his process will do that, but if what you want is a totally separate storage of the image files themselves, individually, you will need to export them. Both ways are good as backup of the original Photos library.

I have lost a lot of pictures I cannot replace when my internal drive failed AND my backup drive failed on the same day, so I know what it means to lose pictures. I now have four backups of my images in four different locations, including the cloud, because I don't want to lose any more.

 

[timkins]

I have made this more confusing than what it is, I am an old windows guy and still do not understand all of the terminology used with the Mac. I have enclosed a screen shot of my photos app with the files/albums. In each one of the files/albums are anywhere from 10 to 250 individual photos. There are 198 files/albums. I just want to copy them to an external SSD. I do not want to remove them from my computer hard drive or the cloud I just want to make a 3rd copy to my external SSD and be able to grab the SSD in case of an emergency or fire and I have to get out of the house. I am truly sorry for any problems this may have caused.

 

[MacInWin]

AH, that makes things a lot easier.

Photos stores the images in the library, so all you really need to rescue your images is a copy of the library, easily portable, to run from the house with. Then get a copy of photos laster on and you will be able to recover the pictures.

To do that, open Photos, click on the "Photos" in the top left corner of the screen, then click on "Preferences." Click on the "General" tab, if it's not already selected. The first item is "Library Location:" followed by the path to the library file where Photos is storing the images. Just as a check, look on that screen for "Importing" and verify that there is a check mark beside "Copy items to the Photos library." If there is a check, all of the actual images are stored in the file in Library Location. If there is NO check mark there, come back and tell us because what I am about to tell you won't work to protect your images.

Assuming the check is there, you can just click on "Show in Finder" in the Library location item and Finder will open to where the library is located. You can then use Finder to copy that file from where it is to where you want it to be stored as a backup. It should be a large file, so it will take a while to copy.

Once it is copied you have a choice to make:

1. Leave Photos as it is and set up some process to repeat this copy/paste operation at whatever interval you may want, or
2. Change the default location to this new external drive, leave the drive attached to the Mac at all times unless you need to evacuate, and just use the external drive as the default location for the Photos library.

Option 1 will keep Photos as speedy as it is now, but unless the copy process is repeated frequently, recent changes will not be reflected on the copy. Any good cloner software can be set up to make the clone at whatever interval you may want to leet that happen automatically. Just keep the destination drive attached in that case so that the cloning can occur.

Option 2 keeps the external copy up to date because it is the actual library, so you don't have to remember to make a copy or clone it. But the external must be attached at all times or Photos may default to create a new library when it starts and you'll have to reconfigure it to point again to the external drive version. And in this setup, unless you specifically do something, you don't have a backup copy of the library as the ONLY copy is on the external. You would have to set up a backup system to back up from the external to your backup drive. TM can do that, as can any of the cloners. But you have to set them up to do so, it's not there as a default. Also, in this scenario Photos may get a bit sluggish, depending on the external drive and interface. The internal drive is always the fastest, so it's better to keep your active files internal when you can. The difference may or may not matter, it is just something to consider.

In either case, when you evacuate, grab the external drive to go with you. When you have recovered, on just about any Mac you can run Photos, point to the library on the external and all of your pictures should be there.

 

[MacInWin]

One more thing. You may also want to consider expanding your iCloud space with Apple and store your pictures in the cloud. That way you don't need to grab anything, it's not in your house, but in the cloud.

 

[IWT]

Just for your information @timkins:

iCloud pricing options
Free: 5GB of storage per iCloud account (not per device) $0.99/month: 50GB of storage (single user) $2.99/month: 200GB of storage (family use) $9.99/month: 2TB of storage (family use)

I recognise that some folks are cautious, not to say shy, of using iCloud as a backup; but I am not one of them.

For $2.99 per month - about the price of a coffee?? - you get 200GB of storage. This is the plan I have. I reckon that's good value for money.

This Apple article gives world prices for storage:

iCloud+ plans and pricing – Apple Support (UK)

When you sign up for iCloud, you automatically get 5 GB of free storage. If you need more space in iCloud, you can upgrade to iCloud+.

support.apple.com

Ian