Quickly Catalog Books or Other Named Items on Shelves
Get the Details on Lock Screen Images that Pop Up
Lift Objects from Photos on the iPhone
Want to Send Holiday Cards This Year? Try Building Them with Motif for Photos
New Organization and Editing in Photos in iOS 13 and iPadOS 13
Need to Import Photos from a non-iPhone or Want to Keep Images out of Photos?
Need to Import Photos from a non-iPhone or Want to Keep Images out of Photos?
Most Mac users rely on iPhones and iPads to take photos and store them in the Photos app, which happens automatically for those who use Apple’s iCloud Photos syncing service. But what if you want to import photos from a device other than an iPhone or iPad—say a Samsung smartphone running Android—and what if you don’t want those images in Photos? Turn to Apple’s Image Capture app, which has shipped with macOS for ages and is stored in your Applications folder’s Utilities folder. To use it, connect your device to your Mac via USB, launch Image Capture, and click the device in the sidebar. Choose a destination from the Import To pop-up menu, and then either select some photos and click Import or click the Import All button to get everything.
(Featured image modified slightly from an original by Al ghazali on Unsplash)
Got another minute? Here are 5 more great links.
- Use This Hidden Feature in Safari to Access Tabs on Your Other Apple Devices
- Here’s How to Make Screenshots and Screen Recordings with Mojave’s New Interface
- Use Continuity Camera to Scan Documents and Take Photos Right into Mac Documents
- A Simple Technique for Decluttering Your Reminders List
- Use Copy as Pathname to Help Someone Find a File on the Mac
Plus 1 or 2 more…
- Need to Do Some Simple Math? Get Siri to Do It!
- A Quick Trick to Turn Your iPhone into a Magnifying Glass
How to Find the Snaps You Want in the Mac’s Photos App
Some of Our Favorite Features of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13
Some of Our Favorite Features of macOS 10.15 Catalina
Is Your Photos Library Too Big? Here’s How to Move It to an External Hard Drive
SSDs are essential for ensuring optimal performance on a Mac, but because they’re expensive, many people don’t have as much built-in storage space as they would like. If your Photos library has grown to the point where your SSD is nearly full, it might be time to think about offloading it to an external hard drive. (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.)
Before we explain how to offload your photos, we want to mention another way of reducing the Photos footprint on your drive. 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. In Photos > Preferences > iCloud, you can enable Optimize Mac Storage, which swaps the full-resolution images for smaller versions, saving a boatload of space. However, you may find Photos somewhat slower to use, as it has to download full-resolution versions of images you work with, and you won’t have a local backup of the original images. So it’s an option, but it has tradeoffs.
For most people with burgeoning Photos libraries, a better approach is to offload the entire library to an external hard drive. This approach comes with tradeoffs too; accessing images from a hard drive is slower than getting them from an internal SSD, and you have to figure out how you’re going to back up that drive as well. Plus, the drive has to be available, connected, and turned on (so you have to listen to it) for you to use Photos at all, which might be especially annoying if you regularly work remotely on a notebook Mac.
To move your Photos library to an external drive, follow these steps:
- If it’s running, quit Photos.
- In the Finder, drag Photos Library, which is stored in your Pictures folder by default, to the external drive. A few answers to common questions:
- Where on the external drive should I put it? It doesn’t matter, but we recommend putting it at the top level so you are less likely to lose track of it in the future.
- I got an error—what should I do? If you see an error telling you that you don’t have permission to copy to that drive, select the drive’s icon in the Finder and choose File > Get Info to open the Info window. If necessary click the triangle next to Sharing & Permissions, and make sure “Ignore ownership on this volume” is selected. If it’s not, click the lock icon, enter an administrator name and password, and select the checkbox.
- How long will it take to copy? Quite some time, depending on how many photos you have. It’s best to do overnight or when you don’t need to use Photos.
- When it’s done copying, double-click the new Photos Library icon on the external hard drive to launch Photos and set it to open that new copy on future launches.
- If you use iCloud Photos, designate this new library as the System Photo Library by choosing Photos > Preferences > General and clicking the “Use as System Photo Library” button.
- Scroll through your photo collection and make sure all your photos are present—double-click a few of them to spot check that the actual images open properly.
Obviously, your original Photos library is still taking up space on your SSD, but it’s best to use the new version for a little while before deleting the old one, just in case. When you’re ready to do that, drag it from the Pictures folder to the trash and choose Finder > Empty Trash to reclaim the space.
Social Media: Running out of space on your internal drive? You can clear a bunch of space by moving your Photos library to an external hard drive—here’s how:
