There’s no macOS issue I hear about more than iCloud Photo Library. It's a service that answers many users’ needs, but there are some not-quite-outlying demands that fall through the cracks. This often revolves around being able to get a full set of your images and movies in iCloud Photo Library if you don’t have enough storage on your Mac startup volume. Macworld reader Shai wrote in with such a concern recently. They have a 300GB media library synced with iCloud Photo Library and a modest disk drive on their MacBook Pro, so Photos for macOS is set to optimize media. The full-resolution versions of images and video are thus only held in iCloud.
When trying to extract their library to shift it to Google Photos, they hit a number of roadblocks. As mentioned, they don’t have the local capacity to download. iCloud.com doesn’t offer a great way to select and download multiple images. On a higher-capacity Windows laptop, which had room for the full library, iCloud software stalled for hours and then filled the drive with unusable files and only retrieved 17GB of actual media files. Shai notes that competing cloud providers, Amazon and Google, offer programming interfaces that let a developer, like them, write software that would let them pull their data down even if there were no graphical interface or software provided.
Apple doesn’t have an API for iCloud exposed to users. (macOS software developers have certain access mediated by Apple for individual user accounts that are logged into iCloud while using the app.) The only method I can recommend is to purchase an external drive of 500GB or 1TB, which are fairly affordable with USB 3.0 support.
Use Photos on your Mac. Learn how to get your photos on all of your devices, manage your collection, and edit and share your photos. Mail, and more. Or send photos to your social media accounts, such as Facebook and Twitter. Select multiple photos. The Photos app makes working with multiple photos and videos from your library quick. 9) Set up multiple user accounts on a Mac If more than one person is regularly using your new Mac then you might want to create different user accounts, just as you would on a PC. Setting them up.
Then follow these steps:. Plug in the external drive, and make sure it’s properly formatted. Make sure Photos isn’t running, and then copy your Photos library to the external drive. There’s no special procedure for copying, as macOS handles the library just like a normal file. When that’s complete, hold down the Option key and launch Photos.
The library on the internal drive will be labeled after its file name in parentheses with “(System Photo Library)”. Click Other Library and select the copied library on the external drive. Select Photos Preferences and, in the General tab, click. In the iCloud tab, make sure iCloud Photo Library is enabled. It may not be, because you switched libraries. Then choose Download Originals to This Mac. Photos will now attempt to download all the media stored in your iCloud Photo Library to the external drive.
You can interrupt the process by quitting Photos and ejecting the drive. The next time you plug the drive in, it should resume even without launching Photos, as Photos has a background agent that manages syncing. The iCloud tab in Preferences shows progress. Depending on your bandwidth, the download could take hours to days (or even longer) to complete. When it’s done, you should have a complete set of your images and videos, and can then take steps to shift to Google Photos.
However, one note of configuration warning with Google Photos: its deletion behavior after your Mac has uploaded media. If you want to upload a set of media larger than your drive per above and then delete pictures and movies from your drive, you have to make sure that the Backup and Sync utility’s Removing Items preference is set to Don’t Remove Items Everywhere or Ask Me Before Removing Items Everywhere.
If set to Remove Items Everywhere, deleting media from your drive also deletes it from Google Photos. Ask Mac 911 We’ve compiled a list of the questions we get asked most frequently along with answers and links to columns: to see if your question is covered. If not, we’re always looking for new problems to solve! Email yours to including screen captures as appropriate, and whether you want your full name used.
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I know, I have posted that link myself a lot. But the method may break, if the shared library is used as the system photo library, because this library is always in use by the background processing, as long as you are logged in. And directly after the system upgrade you will see a lot of background processing going on because the face detection method and the categories changed again.
Wait a bit for the background processing to die down, before you try to use the library again while being logging in from two user accounts. Apple forgot to include this caution about the system photo library in the support document. The user Guide for PowerPhotos mentions this problem however. I just discovered this problem too, running High Sierra. I recently upgraded to a new iMac (High Sierra), and on my old iMac (El Capitan) two users were successfully sharing one Photo library on the same Mac, stored in /Users/Shared/Photos Library on an INTERNAL drive. This had been working for many years for me, I got it to work using ACL (Access Control List) permissions settings.
One user could use the Photos library even if the other user was not logged out (using Fast User Switching), as long as that other user didn't have the Photos app open. But after migrating over to the new Mac and High Sierra I can't get it to work again - if the Photos library is working under user1, even if that user logs out then when user2 tries to access the libary there's a message that the library is busy with another program, and a suggestion to repair permissions. I do not have the Photos library set as the system photos library under either user. If one user repairs permissions as suggested, then that user can open the Library but next time the other user tries to run Photo, the same error message pops up. This is huge problem for me, since the major reason to move to a new iMac at all was to use Photos between the two users.
I've tried re-issuing the same ACL commands that used to work previously under El Capitan and prior OS versions, but that doesn't seem to work. Note: the new iMac has an SSD formatted as AFPS, so I'm wondering if that is a factor and ACLs no longer work for that kind of drive/filesystem? Apple Footer. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only.
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