If you’re using iCloud Photos (previously called iCloud Photo Library) to sync photos and videos between your devices, the originals are all stored in iCloud. (Don’t put it on a drive that you’re using as a Time Machine destination because there could be permissions conflicts, and note that Apple doesn’t recommend storing a Photos library on a drive shared over a network.) Consider Swapping Full Resolution Images for Smaller Imagesīefore we explain how to offload your photos, we want to mention another way of reducing the Photos footprint on your drive.

If your Photos library has grown to the point where your hard drive is nearly full, it might be time to think about offloading it to an external hard drive. The following solutions can help us to manage our ever-increasing digital life and deal with a hard drive that is hitting its capacity for photo storage. While this certainly takes the concern out of using up the available film, the end result is that we have tens of thousands more photos to view, organize, and keep safe. Flash forward to today’s digital media cards that allow us to shoot thousands of photographs with virtually no concern for using up the space on the card. The maximum number of shots you could take was 36 and when the roll was finished, you’d have to go through the hassle of having the film processed. If you don’t know what the picture at the beginning of this blog is, it’s likely you are younger than 40?! Those are film rolls that we older folks used to use to shoot and store photographs.

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