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 iCloud 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 one, 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 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 going to 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 can't spell and then we can leave it
at photo is and we change it to referenced

that way it's going to 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's
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 gigabyte 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

WHERE ARE MY PHOTOS? Understanding Photo Libraries and knowing where your pictures live on the Mac!

WHERE ARE MY PHOTOS? Understanding Photo Libraries and knowing where your pictures live on the Mac!