Storage of photos

[Mulberries]

I have over 9000 photos on my iMac 24: should I transfer some of the older ones to an external drive?

 

[chas_m]

That depends on a lot of questions you haven't answered. 9,000 photos seems like a small collection to me: not counting my RAW photos that I mostly keep in Lightroom, I have two iPhoto libraries with about 25,000 photos between them.

I keep the older photos (pre-2007) on an external drive, and that drive is backed up onto a different drive. The library on the boot drive is backed up to both Time Machine and a clone drive (that's two separate drives), and eventually I will find the time to upload most of them to a private Flickr account (which preserves the original resolution).

This system has worked for me for the last 15 years or so.