This week I got a call from a friend asking me a very specific question about the Photos app in macOS. I wanted to know how you could get all the photos that were part of Photos from one Mac to another And at the same time how could I make a bulk backup of all those photos.
As you know, the Apple Photos application on the Mac works through the libraries concept. With this we want to tell you that knowing how to copy and save those libraries you will already know how to move all the pack of photos you have in Photos as well as making a copy of them.
One of the things that I always advise my acquaintances is that they do not have a single library in Photos with thousands of photographs and that is that as the Photo libraries grow they become more unstable even becoming "corrupt". For this reason, what I advise is that, for example, you have libraries by semesters or quarters of the year so that if you want to access a certain collection of photographs, you only have to go to the appropriate library and open it to see all the photographs that make it up within it.
In order to create new libraries in Photos, all you have to do is hold down the «alt» key at the same time you press the Photos app icon. A window will automatically appear in which you are shown the library that you currently have in use and below that window you have three buttons that allow you to create a new library, open a library that you have in another location and then the Select library button that after pressing it, the library you have selected opens.
The libraries that we are creating are located by default in the System Images folder that although you may have it visible in the left sidebar in the Finder, it may be that you do not have it, so for it to appear you must go to Finder> Preferences> Sidebar and select Images.
Well, if you have managed to get to the Images folder, you will see that inside you have the Photo libraries that after all are a kind of containers that keep not only the photographs inside but everything that has to do with what you have modified in them. To be able to save your photos to another location, all in bulk, all you have to do is copy that container file to a new location. Be careful because if it has many photos inside, it will weigh many gigabytes and that is why I told you before that you get used to making smaller libraries, for example by semesters.
