Your Photos library holds all your photos, albums, slideshows, and print projects. If your library is large, and you want to free up storage space on your Mac, turn on iCloud Photo Library and use Optimize Mac Storage, or move your library to an external drive.
Oct 06, 2018 In case of Photos App (Yosemite and above), you can actually have more than one photo library saved. However, you are only able to open a single photo library at any one time. When you open your Mac’s Photos App, the default library it opens is the System Library. Feb 13, 2018 Quickly Delete Albums in Photos for Mac Tech Talk America. How to Delete Duplicate Photos on Mac (free. Remote Control 11,441 views. Why You Should Disable iCloud Photo Library.
Before you start, be sure to back up your library.
You can store your library on an external storage device, such as a USB or Thunderbolt drive formatted as APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled).1 Find out how to check the format of your external storage device.
To prevent data loss, Apple doesn't recommend storing photo libraries on external storage devices like SD cards and USB flash drives, or drives that are shared on a network.
After you open your library from its new location and make sure that it works as expected, you can delete the library from its original location.
In a Finder window, go back to your Pictures folder (or whichever folder you copied your library from) and move Photos Library to the trash. Then choose Finder > Empty Trash to delete the library and reclaim disk space.
If you have multiple libraries, here's how to open a different one:
Photos uses this library until you open a different one.
If you have a permissions issue with your library, you might be able to resolve the issue by using the Photos library repair tool.
1. You can't move your library to a disk that's used for Time Machine backups.
2. If the volume isn't formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or has been used for Time Machine backups but hasn't been erased, this checkbox will either not be present, or won't be selectable after unlocking. Erase and reformat the drive for this option to be available.