Over the weekend a good friend of mine shared a screenshot of a really scary error message from Photos for Mac. Every photo and video taken over the last two weeks failed to open, saying instead that ‘An error occurred while downloading a larger version of this video for editing.’ The solution? ‘Please try again later.’ and press OK. What’s worse is he was relying on the app’s Optimize Mac Storage setting to fit the library on his local storage and trusting iCloud not to screw things up along the way. And he didn’t have local copies backed up, a mistake he for obvious reasons regretted.
Stories like these aren’t rare, which is why my colleague Jeremy wrote earlier this year that “iCloud Photo Library still isn’t worth the hassles,” despite Apple lowering iCloud storage costs. But I still recommend Photos and iCloud Photo Library, new features that topped my “favorite new Apple things from 2015 that will last for years” list, just not with the default setup. As with any cloud service, the one major caveat is ensure you have a reliable local backup (followed by plenty of patience at the start).
While there’s no turning back data loss, I shared my personal Photos plus iCloud Photo Library setup with my friend, which he’s moving to now for a hopefully better experience. Below I’ll detail each step, which required a little research before I figured it all out, so you can hopefully have a positive experience with Photos and iCloud Photo Library as well.
iCloud Photo Library Benefits
First, let’s discuss the benefits of even bothering with Photos and iCloud Photo Library. Using iCloud Photo Library lets you shoot or import photos and videos from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or the web and have them all go to a single library that you manage.
Delete a photo or video from any signed-in device and it goes to a trash folder for 40 days and can be recovered from any device before it’s fully deleted. Edit a photo’s color or light or crop it and apply a filter and the changes appear everywhere and can be reversed.
Create an album from any signed-in device and it appears everywhere else without syncing with iTunes. Select the heart icon on any photo or video and it appears in a Favorites album on all your devices.
This is how I find the 200 photos that I really like the most out of 13,000 that I’ve taken over the years, which comes in handy when it’s time to make a Christmas calendar at the end of the year.
Finally, iCloud Photo Library (with a subscription to a proper storage tier) lets you access huge sets of photos and videos from iPhones and iPads (and Macs) which would otherwise have too low storage. Using the ‘Optimize Storage’ option lets you see thumbnails of your whole library and selectively download only the photos and videos you open.
My iPhone 6s Plus is 128GB and it can’t comfortably store my photo library plus apps and offline music; even using the free Photo Stream feature on a 16GB iPad Air meant installing very few apps to accommodate the storage needs. Turn on iCloud Photo Library and you may still see the occasional low storage warning, but Photos will respond in the background by removing full images and videos stored in iCloud to free up space.
iCloud Photo Library Risks
But any number of things could go wrong with iCloud Photo Library or your iCloud account in general. So I do not recommend using Photos and iCloud Photo Library with Optimize Storage turned on anywhere without a Mac using the Download Originals option somewhere.
The problem is your Mac may not have enough internal storage to hold your entire photo library either, but Photos on OS X lets move your Photos library from the default Photos folder to cheaper and higher capacity external storage with little work.
But even with photos and videos downloaded locally either internally or externally, it’s possible something could go wrong with iCloud Photo Library and even your local files could get hosed in the process. OS X features a system backup tool called Time Machine that “automatically makes hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for all previous months. The oldest backups are deleted when your backup drive is full.”
By default, external drives are excluded, but you can easily change this in the Time Machine settings within System Preferences.
Having at least one Mac with Photos setup to download original photos and videos that backup to Time Machine greatly minimizes the risk that something will get hosed in iCloud Photo Library. (I understand not using the service if you have a bad experience somewhere else along the way, but these steps should help iCloud Photo Library work for you.)
My Setup
Here’s exactly what I use plus recommendations:
- Always-on Mac mini (this is my desktop setup, MacBooks, iMacs, and Mac Pros are fine too but being connected often is key)
- Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD internally to speed things up
- Seagate Expansion 2TB HDD externally to hold my Photos and iTunes libraries (although I’d opt for a Thunderbolt G-Drive if buying today)
- Apple AirPort Extreme + Seagate Expansion 5TB HDD for Time Machine backups (Apple also offers 2TB and 3TB Time Capsules which are Extremes with internal drives)
- 200GB iCloud storage for $2.99/month to sync my 13,080 photos and 1,015 videos and counting, plans go up to 1TB for $9.99/month.
The Mac is always on and regularly syncs and downloads my iCloud Photo Library to Photos even when the app is closed. I upgraded the slow hard disk drive that came with my Mac for a faster solid state drive (guide here), sacrificing storage for speed.
I keep a larger external drive connected over USB 3 which works fine, although a faster Thunderbolt drive will eventually replace that for me. Apple’s AirPort Extreme is pricey but I use Apple’s AirPort Utility app enough that it’s worth it for me, plus I connect a larger external drive to it to hold all my Mac’s Time Machine backups.
Finally, Apple’s $3.99/month plan gives me 200GB of iCloud storage and I’ve got about 80GB free so there’s room to grow for me. Your specific needs will vary, but you should get the general idea.
Once you’ve got all the pieces in place, there are a few settings that differ from the defaults you’ll want to know about. If you’re Photos library won’t fit on your internal drive, you can move it from the Pictures folder in Finder to your connected external drive.
The trick here is to remember to set the new location as your system library in the Preferences for Photos. Only the System Photo Library can sync with iCloud Photo Library, although you can create additional libraries stored internally or externally that backup if you have the need.
The Download Originals to this Mac option in the Preferences for Photos should be checked on for the whole process to ensure this is the true version of your photo collection. This means your photos and videos are fully saved locally and not relying on iCloud for access.
Next, if you’re responsibly using Time Machine backups, keep in mind that the default system setting is to ignore external drives. You can change this in the System Preferences app under Time Machine > Options > Select drive > click – (minus) > Save. This step is key and took some initial Googling on my part when I first had the thought to go this route.
Knowing I have my whole iCloud Photo Library saved locally and backed up with my desktop Mac allows me to use the Optimize Storage option on my MacBook, iPhone, and iPad, giving me full access to my photos and videos regardless of local without worrying about losing data.
Additionally, you could add online backup with services like Backblaze or CrashPlan for added peace of mind (just check how external drives are handled). If you’re Mac and external hard drives are stolen or destroyed in a fire, you’re back to relying on iCloud alone to recover your photo library. Budgets and bandwidths will vary, obviously, so consider this piece a non-essential add-on to the equation.
For me, I consider external storage and Time Machine backups essential to using iCloud Photo Library with Photos. No matter how good iCloud got at being a reliable cloud service, it’s solely my responsibility to ensure that my personal photo collection of my daughter growing up doesn’t disappear one day.
Have you own Photos and iCloud Photo Library setup that you trust? Let us know in the comments.
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Spend the money, buy Lightroom and forget about any software from Apple having anything to do with Photos. They’ve been trying for almost 15 years now and it’s obvious they still don’t get photo storage, locally, let alone in “the cloud.”
Then just use Time Machine the way you always do and your backups are taken care of. No worries. Use as many external or other disks as you want.
“Then just use Time Machine the way you always do and your backups are taken care of. No worries. Use as many external or other disks as you want.”
Just make sure you have a remote backup as well. No local backups will do any good if your house burns or someone breaks in and steals all your hardware.
Lightroom, looks very difficult to manage one have to go full tutorial, its not easy like Photos app.
spent weeks tinkering with both Lightroom sync and Apple Photos — Apple Photos won hands down, and I’ve been using Lightroom for years and love it. Lightroom sync on macbook, iPad, iPhone resulted in duplicate mismanagement which was worse than anything I’ve seen with iCloud Photolibrary.
Great article. I’ll be getting a RAIDed NAS in the new year and photos and iTunes are the first things I’m moving out of my Mac. I have enough space for them (a 1 TB boot drive and a 500GB as a backup for critical stuff) but my next system probably won’t be so endowed. Better to get things sorted out now. Plus it will add an additional layer to my backup strategy. I’ll be bookmarking this article for future reference.
Remember that RAID != backup.
-sigh- Yes it is if you know how to use it.
I agree that a striped RAID is in and of itself not a backup. But if you use a RAID volume as a backup then it is a backup volume. My TimeMachine destination will be going to the RAID so it will be a backup. If you have a RAID with redundancy built in, like the RAID 1 I’m going to be using, that’s two copies. If one drive goes down I can replace it and it will restore from the other. It’s all how you manage your volumes.
My iTunes and Photos libraries will be on the NAS, so they’ll be copied on both volumes and can be restored from either. Then I’ll be doing periodic backups from the RAID to an external USB drive kept offsite. I ran servers for too long to trust just one level of backup.
You are correct that with something like RAID1, you’re creating a mirror and effectively have two copies of the same data. What you are forgetting is that there can be many errors besides a harddrive failure. If you write corrupted data to your drive, you’ll end up with two copies of the same corrupted data and no backup. Striped RAID or RAID0 really isn’t RAID. RAID should only be used as a way to minimise the problems causes by disk failures.
Correct, but that’s true of any system. Write errors are always a risk. That’s why multiple layers of redundancy are needed. Even then you still could lose it all.
Please be aware that you cannot use iCloud synching if the photos library is on a NAS. I moved mine to a Drobo unit on my network and wasn’t able to enable iCloud synching afterwards as Apple prohibits that with network drives/NAS. Of course, that sucks as, if you have a lot of photos/videos, you naturally want to move it to external storage and NAS is a great way to go.
For the error part just change the DNS to google 8.8.8.8
iPhoto is the worst program. Fails constantly on my MAC. Apple really died with Jobs.
They don’t have iPhoto anymore. iPhoto was one of most raved applications when Apple still did the iLife suite.
I do think Photos is neglected and should get regular updates and feature improvements. iTunes also needs regular updates like it used to get.
I agree under Jobs the software would not get neglected like it does now. I think for one the designers are moved to much between projects and platforms. They are moved between designing IWatch software, Apple TV, iOS, OS X and Apples apps for iOS and OS X. The departments should be more clearly defined or Apple should higher way more software engineers.
Apple needs to focus on its software again. I preferred when Apple did the yearly major iLife updates since new features and bugs were squashed quickly. Photos has not seen a major update since Apple first released it.
Photos was only launched about 7 months ago. Seems a bit too soon for a “major update”. You said yourself that they used to do major iPhoto updates once a year.
Apple still does iLife.. it just replaced iPhoto in iLife with Photos… as for the major update part, Apple will surely announce Photos to version 2.0 along with the OSX 10.12 announcement at WWDC 2016… in El Capitan, they added Photos Extensions to the mix.. though I personally feel they missed the ball by not allowing users to round trip edited photos to a higher res filetype like TIFF instead of the compressed to hell JPEG.. maybe they will add an option in the next update..
It’s time to leave iPhoto behind.. it was slow when you had a lot of photos and Photos handles large libraries like a charm.
Just use Google Photos and call it a day. Too many moving parts here
The whole point of the article is not trusting a cloud service with all your photos – i.e. configuring a set-up which includes local copies, and backups of those local copies. Whether or not you then use Google Photos or iCloud or Dropbox or whatever to store copies in the cloud is irrelevant to the article’s premise.
Exact setup I use and works like a charm. Highly recommend.
can anyone explain the difference in deleting using the backspace key – and in deleting using the cmd+backspace key? it asks if you want to remove from all devices on the latter – but in my tests it did so even when simply using the backspace key… anyone knows?
my workflow resembles the author’s with one difference.. NO CLOUD….
External drive is a must and because I don’t want to use iCloud Photo Library, I have the option to have my photos on the external drive in a folder structure I manage… the Photos Library only “references” to the external drive.. So if for some reason I want all my RAW photos to be used in another app like say DXO Optics Pro, I don’t lose my Photos app albums and keywords and I can use any app I want with my photos…
just uncheck “Copy items to the Photos library” in the Preferences of the Photos app if you wish to organize your pics in a folder structure.
Has anyone tried this with a NAS instead of an external HDD?
I’d like to get a Synology to hold all of my local files (across multiple computers). Since it will be RAID and have tons of storage I’d like that to be the main storage location for my Photos Library.
Does putting the Library on a Network Attached device add enough trouble to make it unusable?
That’s exactly what I’m hoping to do. With a Sinology NAS even.
Synology
I don’t use Apple Photos so I don’t know whether it will work with a NAS, just make sure to have a good backup of your NAS as well if you go this route.
You can’t use the iCloud synch/backup feature if you move your Photos library to a NAS. Apple prohibits that.
Great article, I was planning this for a while. I would like to ask everybody’s opinion on having two separate external storage devices as author suggests for TimeMachine and for external copy of the photos library.
My setup is slightly different. I just bought 12Tb Lacie hardware raid and set it up as RAID 1 (6 TB X 6TB ). So I have redundancy on the data. Then I created two partitions: Partition 1 is – 2TB just for TimeMachine backups and Partition 2 – 4TB for external storage to which I am moving my photos library. Now, obviously at the end this is still the same hardware and should Lacie RAID fail, I potentially could lose both TimeMachine Backup and photos backup. But having two separate devices attached at the same time seem like a bit of an overkill. What is your opinion, separate hardware device for each purpose or what I described would pass your level of paranoia about data-loss? (I would still have iCloud copies of data as well in addition to the RAID)
Do i just drag the Photo Library Icon into the external?
Apple should, first of all, provide iCloud space at least as big as the iPhone you buy, for free. And add that to any other portable device you have. That for starters. 5GB of Cloud space for free is ridiculous. You cannot even backup your 700€ (!!) phone on it.
That said, the Cloud library is a great idea. But considering upload speeds at home (in <10Mbit ranges) makes the setup a burden as soon as you have something in the order of a GB or more. I have about 70GB…and even if I have 120Mbit DL speed, I have only 6Mbit UL speed and my provider is not changing that anytime soon. No other chance available yet. I live in Munich in Germany, not in some lost village in the middle of nowhere. Maybe other cities/countries have better UL speeds available from their providers. It would take me 1.5 days to upload the whole thing (with no breaks).
Similarly to iCloud Photo Library, Apple Music iCloud Music library would be nice. Too bad it presumptuously destroyed years of work in building my library, by changing artwork, substituting songs you rightfully own with DRM versions of them (in case you accidentally delete a file from your Mac and press the "download" button to get a new copy it matched to; the DRM copy will disappear if you disable Apple Music…), or does not even match correctly its own iTunes music you bought from them (either because the song is not available anymore, for some reason; or not available as a single anymore, etc; or because for some magical reason the song you bought is now 1 sec longer or shorter than what they have now in their library and doesn't match anymore).
So, I think this all works really well if you start from scratch or very little library, no ripped CDs, no previously bought songs at iTunes or elsewhere. And you saved money buying a 16GB iPhone – with the 100€ you save, actually a bit more, you can get Apple Music, OR, a bit more storage on iCloud…
Otherwise, better stay local, if you want to stay with Apple.
This time, sorry, it just DOESN'T work.
Good article. My housemate has lost SO many photos over the years to iCloud (or is it iBlackHole?) Anyway, I’d love to set this up on my computer and hers. I have a nice, roomy NAS drive I’m going to configure with Time Machine.
You show a number of configuration screen shots, but where did you go for these? They look nothing like the iCloud settings on my Mac. I’m not normally this thick, but can’t find it. :/
confused me too – he is in the preferences of Photos, not system preferences ; )
Really? Fortunately, I haven’t lost a single photo so far. :D
I use the same setup Zach! Too bad I had to figure it out myself through trial and error first. For those that don’t understand RAID, use FolderWatch with another attached drive. It keeps the folders synced as long as the program is running. I do agree with others on here that the Photos app is sometimes sticky. I have to go check on it now and then and restart the program because photos are not coming down from iCloud. A simple restart or re-open of the program seems to fix the issue but it’s still a bit frustrating.
How exactly one does transfer the Photos library to an external drive? I dragged and dropped it into the drive, it copied it, but the Photos preferences still references the original folder location, not the copied one. Should I simply delete it after copied and then close and open the app, crossing my fingers it will automatically find the new location? Sounds too risky for me!
this was left out of the instructions to move your Photo library (macworld had the answer):
“Remarkably, you can just move it!
Quit Photos.
Copy the Photos Library by dragging it from the startup volume to your external volume.
When complete, hold down the Option key and launch Photos.
In Photos, select Photos > Preferences, and in the General tab, click Use as System Photo Library.”
Am I missing something about removing photos from my iPhone? All the photos I take clutter my storage and I haven’t found an easy way to get the photos OFF my device and securely on my Mac. Do tell.
is there a way to just back up my photos using time machine and my external hard drive?
This article is referring to put the Photos file to external drive and use it to turn on photos iCloud, but when i did that i got this message
“iCloud features for photos are only available in the system photo library”
why is that so.
Sorry my bad, I got it
I would like to have my Favorites always stored locally. For example there are videos I use to show to my friends but they took so long to download everytime.
Awesome. Good set up option. Thanks for putting this together.
One note: the AirPort Extreme has only a USB 2.0 port, so it’s just a slow backup and there is no point in paying extra for a USB 3.0 drive. My guess is this is to make you buy a time capsule instead.
Instead of an airport disk, I’m going to to go with a NAS solution that has AFP/time machine backup options:
https://www.qnap.com/i/en/tutorial/con_show.php?op=showone&cid=58
On a personal note, Apple makes backups difficult seemingly just to sell the extra cloud space, or a more expensive product to stay within their ecosystem. This is unfortunate considering the upfront cost of all their devices and the less-than-upfront manner that most of us encounter these problems months after purchase.
Thanks again for your tutorial, great information.
I don’t quite follow the article. I thought it was going to address my problem, but I don’t think it does.
I have a 1TB airport Timecapsule. I have a Mac Book Air with a 128GB hard drive, which is connected to the Timecapsule via WIFI. I have an ever expanding Photos library which is 119GB already. The library is stored on the Timecapsule. I would love to get all of my photos onto Photos on iCloud and have it synch, but it cannot do it because the photos are on an external drive.
I would like to achieve (a) a good way of backup up my photos, and (b) a way of synching them so that i can access them across all devices and my wife can do this too.
Can anyone recommend how I’d do this?
Thank you in advance.
And if it is impossible with a networked hard drive, could I use an SD Drive instead? I’ll happily invest in the additional drive, but only if I have the confidence to know that it’ll work.
This is pretty much the setup I have been using since December. I also backup to crashplan. For crashplan to “see” inside the photolibrary package, I created a simlink to the masters folder.
Nice sharing! I believe that transferring photos from iPhone to an external hard drive is always a wise choice. For one thing, it helps prevent permanent loss of your iPhone pictures. For another, it saves your computer when you find available storage is starting to wane, assuming that you plan to transfer iPhone photos to computer at first. Better yet, by copying photos from iPhone/iPad to external hard drive, you can view these photos on any computer since it is very convenient for you to bring the external drive everywhere. So I recommend you FonePaw iOS Transfer, you can transfer photos from iPhone to computer directly. I think it’s much better to backup my files and easy to use.
Super-Way-Late here….but can someone help answer a question about this setup.
I have a Xfinity Modem/Router (yes leased, I know I could save money by buying…)
In the steps it says to use the Airport Extreme and External Drive.
Could I just hook up the External drive to my always-on computer?
what benefit does hooking it up to the Router/Airport Extreme provide against just using the computer?
THANKS!!!