well hello again today we're going to discuss
libraries and where your photos actually live and are stored on your mac let's go
okay so the first thing we need to understand is the way apple and photos organizes and the
terminology used so we have to define what are called libraries you'll see this often
if you use imovie or final cut apple has what are called libraries and it's like a self-contained
item that contains pictures or videos or anything related to a project and specific
to photos we have a photo library so the very first time you open up photos it creates a library
and most people just automatically import and add photos and they are added to this self-contained
bucket called library and all of your photos actually live there
now if you've been experimenting or going through the preferences you can actually flip
a little button that doesn't put those pictures inside of that library which can cause a little
confusion down the road if you didn't do that on purpose so let's go ahead and take a look
now when i first open up photos it's going to open up my library which one that's what i'm used
to these are all of my pictures but these photos actually live not in photos they live in a library
and that library is located in the finder inside of pictures and we have this photos library here
so this is actually where my photographs physically are if this were to be deleted
there goes all my pictures they're all gone if i go back to photos and choose the preferences under
photos this first option under the general tab is library location so it's saying hey your main
library that you use on your computer that is your default one that synchronizes with icloud photos
and everything else on your machine is located in the home folder inside of pictures and here's that
photos library and i can even click on shelf in finder here and it takes me directly there
if i click on icloud over here it also links to icloud so all of these pictures are actually
being uploaded to this whole if cloud library this photo library that i have access to on icloud.com
my ipad my iphone my other computer i have access to all of those photos because it's using the
cloud as a distribution to send those photographs and videos to all locations of all the devices now
let's go ahead and take a step back let's pretend that we're starting from scratch and we don't have
any photo library and we just want to understand how the libraries work so i'm going to go ahead
and quit photos and we're going to create a new library maybe you didn't know this but
you can actually have multiple libraries for different purposes maybe you're a photographer
or a school teacher or whatever it may be and you want to just have these little buckets of
photo libraries that you can quickly move to a different hard drive or a different computer so
the way to do that is if i hold down option on the keyboard and click on photos in the dock it
brings up this option to choose the library so i can either open up a different library i can
create a new or choose from this list here well i'm going to go ahead and create a new library and
we're just going to call this library city photos and i'm going to save it right to my desktop here
and when i click ok it's going to open up a brand new photos library no photos nothing it's
literally starting from scratch and if i move this over to the side here notice on the desktop you
can actually see that photos library right here the beautiful thing about having a photos library
you're able to easily move it from location and location so let's say that your computer is
starting to get filled up because you have so many photos and videos the nice thing about a library
is you can take that whole library as itself and copy it to an external hard drive and run all of
your photos off of that library from that external hard drive without taking that space up on your
computer now if we look at this new new photos library that we created there's one very very very
very very important setting that will dictate if these pictures are inside of this library
or not inside so if we go up to photos and choose preferences and click on general notice there's a
little check box for importing and it says copy items into photo library so if i uncheck this
it's now saying hey only items copied to the library will upload to icloud photos well that's
fine i'm not using this library so i'm going to ignore that let's just say that this accidentally
got checked and we go about our day and we start adding photos so i have some pictures from
minneapolis here on my desktop a folder i'm just going to go ahead and drag that into here
you may see an icon that you've never seen before notice if we look at if i double click on one of
these pictures notice in the top right here it has this little square with an arrow it's
saying it's a referenced file meaning that this picture here photos is just acting as
the viewer but the photo itself actually lives on the desktop here in this minneapolis folder
in inside of here and it's referenced so the pictures are not there let's say that i copied
this folder to an external hard drive copy that and then let's say that i delete this folder
on the computer now if i close out of photos and open photos back up and i try and open up
one of these pictures it's going to say hey missing file i have no idea where this uh
this picture is and you're pretty much out of luck if you don't know where those original
pictures are at it's gonna be really hard to track them down and just overall you could
potentially lose a lot of photos just by not fully understanding where these pictures are referenced
and that's going to happen for every single one if i try and go into any of these it's going to
say hey sorry missing file so this option this preference inside of photos is really important
to understand what this importing does and the reasons for it and the reasons not for it
and there are some reasons to not have them inside of the library or to have them referenced
for those that use maybe lightroom or capture one or photoshop it gives a little bit more
flexibility when using different tools for your photographs so now let's say that we figure that
oops we realize that is turned on and so we want to actually copy the items into the photo library
so i'm going to take this city of chicago i'm going to drag chicago in here and that's
going to import the photographs into chicago or from chicago into here and now they're copied
into the library so they're actually living inside of this self-contained library
which makes it really helpful where i can just take this whole library move it to a different
computer or a different external hard drive and i can work from that and all of the photos all
of the organization the albums the people the places the metadata the keywords all of that is
self-contained within that library and notice that with these photographs they don't have
they don't have that little icon in the top right for the referenced like the minneapolis photos do
just for a reference chicago's fun i'm actually originally from right outside chicago so i try
and get there as much as possible and um i miss it oh yeah the bean good times side note rant
over i digress i digress now we're at the point where those chicago files are imported into the
library and we have all of these other ones that are referenced so if i actually double click on
this because i know where those pictures are at because we moved them to my external hard drive
i can click on find original and navigate to where that folder was at here and choose folder and it
will go and relink all of those photos right back up for me so now notice that little red slash
in that little icon in the top right is now gone so if i click on any of these
they're now re-linked they've established that connection but i want to take it even a step
further because let's say i don't want them referenced anymore i want to just bring those
pictures right back into this library so what we can do is we can select all of these photos
hold down shift select them all
and i can go up to file and choose consolidate and this is going to bring those pictures over
now here's now here's a nice little trick also let's say that you have thousands and
thousands of photos well we don't want to scroll through every single one of them to look for that
little icon in the top right so what you can do is create a smart album to say referenced
photos cannot spell and then we can leave it at photo is and we change it to referenced
that way it's gonna automatically find all of those photos for you here and we can just do
command a to select them all or do edit select all and then do file consolidate and then choose copy
and that's going to bring and copy all of those pictures from that external location
and now they're all going to be inside of this one single photos library and if i get the information
on this library here it's now 517 megabytes so it's it's growing it's a lot larger
so i know that all of the files are in there that is why it's very important for the preferences and
what this setting actually means because you want to make sure if you're using photos i would highly
recommend to have it a self-contained library that way all of the pictures are copied into
that library for you here's a side note also i got a new drone recently and these are some pictures
that we were taking downtown minneapolis and it's just it's so like desolate there's like no one
out on the streets and i'm so impressed with the drone though um we flew it took a lot of pictures
and i was able to get some great shots over the water and of the city and in general and it was
really cool a lot of fun maverick 2 pro well done guys well done all right so that's a little bits
of libraries now let's say i quit out of this photos and here's that library again if i hold
down option on the keyboard i can go back down to photos and i can now see that there's actually
two different photo libraries and i can click back on this one which is my system library which
links to my icloud photos and i can choose library and it's going to open up that library which has
all of my photos in them so it's a very very uh it's a nice way to keep different projects
separate or you want to understand really where your photographs are at and
your photos library can get large pretty quickly if i go to the finder here and i went to the
pictures and choose on my main library you know it's almost it's just over 450 gigabytes worth
of photos so that's that's a lot of space and if your hard drive is only 500 gigabytes
uh if you only have a 500 gallon bucket on your computer it's probably a good time to think about
buying an external hard drive and moving this photos library to that to free up some space on
your computer if you need to and the nice thing it's it's very easy once it's self-contained we
can we'll quit out of photos if i take this city photos library that i created i can drag it right
to my external hard drive here and it's going to copy that library into this external hard drive
which then allows me to take this hard drive and plug it into any mac that's running the
same version of photos and i can view and edit and pick up exactly where i left off
so now that that library is here i can actually take this one from my desktop to the trash
if i double click on this library i'm right back where i left off
all of the pictures are there because i've moved that library of photos to where i want
it to go so that's pretty much where your photos live uh they either live in a library or they're
referenced someplace to a library and i hope you learned something if you like this video
show some love hit subscribe down there at the bottom and we'll see you next time