HeyYou Loc: SE Michigan

I have 450 GB of photos on my 500 GB Mac Air laptop - and rapidly growing. Organized into iPhoto (the older ones) and Photos. (I have all my SD cards - so I do have a backup copy of everything.)

The time has come to move my photos onto external hard drives to free up some room on my laptop. I intend to buy two external hard drives so as to free up space, and to have a backup. I would then connect one of the external drives to my laptop when i want to add new photos and to do post-processing.

My question: how do I copy the photos ? Just drag and drop the iPhoto and Photos programs with the pictures in them onto the external hard drives ? (I'm not into Lightroom or Luminar yet - but this will allow me to start using one of those programs.)
And does this entail getting a new copy (or copies) of the Photos and iPhoto programs ? Note - please answer in concrete terms - i am not a computer expert !
Thank you.

jvnsuffolk

I have 2 hhd's on my network. I just copy and paste photos onto it.

quagmire Loc: Greenwood,South Carolina

been doing that,copying cd,s to hard drive (external) select first pic of series hold shift key and click,then click on last pic,right click if you want to rename do and hit enter,after pic selected renamed etc,right click and select send to click on and select where to put.

JR45 Loc: Montgomery County, TX

I'm a PC guy and don't know about MAC's, but would do a copy and paste, then make sure
of the copy before removing from the HD.

blackest Loc: Ireland

No copying is not really what you want to do. What would be better is a program like carbon copy cloner or superduper

what they do is similar to copying but its an intelligent copy, they only copy what isn't on the backup drive already. It also means you can stop a backup and resume it later.

Lets say you have 200GB of photos on your internal hard drive a straight copy would work and hopefully wouldn't get interrupted part way through but then you add another 20GB of files to that 200GB you are not 100% sure which are changed from the original 200GB so you copy 220GB of files and hope that gets through ok... you now have 420GB of photos unless you delete the first backup... and it took ages to do.

Superduper or carboncopycleaner will just copy the additional 20GB skipping over the unchanged photo's and even making new copies of your older photos that you changed as well. You can even revert the changes you made. The drive will be bootable too, so you can even boot your backup on another mac and have all your files to hand...

much better than just copying, less stress , less time :)

These programs are based on rsync which is a command line tool. the command line takes a lot of complicated arguments which the gui makes easy for you.

synctoy is not a toy but a very good microsoft backup tool
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15155
essentially does most of the same as the mac programs but i don't think you can boot the backup drive.

jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana

Put your photos in files and move the files to the external drive--easy.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I always use drag and drop, but I do it in small amounts. It might not matter, but I'd rather not have both drives running for an hour or more. Get a good drive, like HGST or WD Black, of 2TB or more.

Haymaker

Country Boy Loc: Beckley, WV

I don't know the MAC functions but drag and drop has always been a good choice. With Windows, I right click and use the "send to" option, that works for me.

blackest Loc: Ireland

I know you are retired jerry but you have way too much spare time.

with a backup program like carbon copy cloner you can choose what wants backing up and just let it get on with it if there is a problem then its flagged and the job continues. Even losing power half way through isn't a problem its got a list of files and knows what needs copying and what doesn't.

There is no point in having a dog and barking yourself.

jwn Loc: SOUTHEAST GEORGIA USA

you can redirect where you Photo looks for the Photo library to the outboard hard drive. so no drag and drop necessary. I did this with the Itunes/mp3 files to free up more space on the iMac drive for photos. go to the support section on Apple site and search.

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

Just click the folder your photos are in and drag it to the ext hard drive. Then ge a cup of coffee, that many will take some time...a lot of time, maybe go have dinner too.

Hal81 Loc: Bucks County, Pa.

My son is the computer expert and set up everything for me. Every thing goes directly my external drive without me doing anything. In 1970 when he graduated from high school he got a job with the NJ highway dept. as a draftsman. One floor of their office building was nothing but drawing tables. He ask why they weren't using computers? They ask him to set up a program. Almost over night they went to computer. They paid bonuses for Ideas. The biggest bonus he ever got was when told them they should put ash trays in the mens room.

Dennis833 Loc: Australia

The first step I recommend is to simply drag and drop your folders onto the back up hard drives. Once all of your files are on the new drives you need to purchase Carbon Copy Cloner. This is your friend in the future when you cannot remember what has to be backed up! https://bombich.com/download

blackest Loc: Ireland

You can just download the trial and select full backup and it will clone the entire drive this will take a good few hours on a large drive but you can stop at any point and resume later. It knows when a file has been successfully copied and there are typically over a million. Just download, select the source your internal drive, and your destination your external drive. Then do something else.

There is no need for you to manually copy anything! As it happens i'm doing it right now and i expect it will keep going while i am asleep later tonight. If I did this copy manually i would be working all night instead of sleeping :)