Steve, the way I understood your original post, you were concerned about your ¡°up to this point¡± photos, going forward you will need to repeat what ever steps you take. If you are worried about not remembering the steps, write yourself a Note or TextEdit and place copies in both locations. As with other data and docs, back it up.
You are worried about full sized photos. If you take a lot of photos you want to keep, your iCloud Storage is going to get expensive, so I would put them on external drives in any case, even if you have then in the cloud and on your computer.
Brent
On my iPhone Xr
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On May 8, 2025, at 10:16, Steve Kane <skane-l@...> wrote:
?Otto, that is what I was kicking around but then I realized what Ben said earlier, that it would not capture future photos.
Ben, that looks doable, though I know myself well enough to know that future me might miss a step or even forget just what the heck I had done. ;-)
My M2 MacBook Air is carrying the full 2TB SSD. But, I am a digital pack rat (since 1987). Though I did just trash all 150MB (sigh, not GB) that was sitting in my Downloads folder.
I sent an email to fatcatsoftware.com <> asking if their PowerPhotos app could help with this. If/when they reply I will post here.
On May 8, 2025, at 11:28?AM, Ben Rosenthal via groups.io <ben@...> wrote:
I think your best scenario is to move your library of originals to an external drive, create a second user account on your Mac, sign into your same Apple account, and point iCloud Photos to the external. Make sure this drive is included in backups. Then, make your local library optimized.
Ongoing, to keep your full library up to date, you¡¯ll need to make sure your second account is at least logged-in in the background and the external drive connected. Photos¡¯ background process will handle the syncing.
When you go out, you can eject the drive. Upon reconnecting, background syncing will continue as long as the second account is logged in.
On May 8, 2025, at 08:47, Steve Kane <skane-l@...> wrote:
?But if I enable "Optimize Mac Storage" in the Mac Photos app then my local copy of Photos Library.photoslibrary would only contain thumbnails, or anyway reduced resolution copies of my photos. The full resolution photos would only exist on Apple's iCloud servers.
I would like to have a way of having a backup of my photos (and preferably the whole Photos Library.photoslibrary file) in another place in addition to Apple's servers.
For practical reasons I do not want to simply move my Photos Library.photoslibrary file to an external drive because I sometimes move around with my MacBook Air and leave behind all other devices, in which case, my MacBook Air would not have my photos. Photos Library.photoslibrary would be left behind on an external drive.
On May 8, 2025, at 9:56?AM, Otto Nikolaus via groups.io <otto.nikolaus@...> wrote:
You could use TM, CCC or SD to back up whatever you want.
Otto
On 8 May 2025, at 15:32, Steve Kane via groups.io <skane-l@...> wrote:
macOS 15.4.1, M2 MacBook Air
Photos > Settings > iCloud
In the not too distant future I may have to enable "Optimize Mac Storage" on my Mac to recover storage space on the internal SSD.
Is there a way I could make backups to an external SSD of the full res photo library on an ongoing basis?
I suppose iCloud would have to somehow be persuaded to download the full res photo library to an external drive?
Maybe some third party utility?
Anyone know?
Brent