Yikes again!Īpple's writeup leaves me with a couple of critical questions…
#Using apple photos with external drive mac#
So there are potentially a lot of Mac users with small internal drives who may be affected by this. And in today's Mac world, that could be a lot of people-while you can configre some machines with up to 2TB of solid state storage (and iMacs with bigger Fusion drive), doing so is wildly expensive. Think about that for a bit…this affects anyone with limited internal storage space who has their photos stored on an external drive. Not just "don't back up the Photos Library folder with Time Machine," but "don't back up the entire drive with Time Machine." Yikes! In a nutshell, Apple recommends that if you've moved the System Photo Library to an external drive-as nearly anyone who takes lots of pictures will have done, given space-limited solid-state internal drives-you do not use Time Machine on that drive. That's taken from the System Photo Library overview, part of Photos' help. This makes much more sense continue reading only if you care about my feelings on the original incorrect wording. That just means you shouldn't use the same external drive for both your Photos library and as a destination drive in Time Machine. The permissions for your Photos library may conflict with those for the Time Machine backup. If a Photos library is located on an external drive, don’t use Time Machine to store a backup on that external drive. Update: Thanks to reader Brian for commenting below that Apple has updated this page with much clearer wording.