Export photo albums from Photos to External Drive

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Happy New Year!

I have 73 albums containing a total of 3366 photographs on my iMac, all backed up to iCloud.

What I want to do is, hopefully, export a copy of the entire contents of Photos to an external drive keeping all the photos in their albums and then have the ability to display those photos on another Mac, PC or even TV. Am I asking too much?

I still want to retain everything in Photos on my Mac and my research so far, apart from thoroughly confusing me, suggests that my external drive should be formatted ExFAT. That is as far as I have got!
 

IWT


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A possible solution might be to copy your Photos library in toto to an External Hard Drive (EHD).

Whatever you do, don't meddle with, open up or alter your library. But it can be found here:

Macintosh HD > Users > Your Name > Pictures > Photos Library.photoslibrary

You could copy/paste or use any method you care to copy that library to an EHD. The structure of the library would remain intact.

However, to view them on another Mac, you would need the same version of Photos app and you would have to direct Photos app to the EHD. This is done by opening the Photos app > Preferences > General > Show in Finder

This article takes you through the steps: https://www.howtogeek.com/214569/how-to-move-your-apple-photos-library-to-another-location/

As far as getting a Windows PC to view the Photos Library, that's a different proposition altogether.

I think a much better way than via an EHD is to set up and use iCloud Photos on the Windows PC. See how to do this here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT205323

Therefore I suggest you Format your EHD as OS X Extended (Journaled) and use it exclusively for a Mac - and use the iCloud on the Windows PC.

Ian
 
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pine man
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Thanks ever so much for all the info I'll have a good look through it all and see what's best.

It was so much easier in the good old days when you just passed round the album (with all the sepia photographs in it!!)

Edit

Ian
Thanks again for your advice. What I did in the end was to keep the EHD formatted as ExFAT and create 73 Folders on it named after the Albums on Photos. Having done that I exported the contents of each Album to the corresponding Folder on the EHD. It can be read on PC & Mac and it took about an hour, which is one way of helping to fill a wintery Sunday afternoon!!
 
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IWT


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Well done. A lot of sweat and labour there. "Whatever Works", as the Woody Allen character used to say.

Ian
 

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