BenRiceMHaving Lots of Photos is a F**king Nightmare
https://www.benricemccarthy.com/having-lots-of-photos-is-a-f-king-nightmare/
Tom_Pagano@BenRiceM There is also an option in Photos to have your actual Photos library stored on an external drive so I can have the advantage of not actually filling up the Mac, but everything still gets synced to iCloud and you can back that up separately. But I guess if your primary Mac is a laptop that means you don’t have any access to your library when you are away from that external drive.
@tompagano Primary is desktop, but my Photo library is currently close to 2TB, and my *entire photo collection* (which is mostly work stuff, so I don’t need in my personal iCloud Photo Library) is over 4TB, so a suitable external SSD would be pricy.
And external HDD would be too slow.
What’s been suggested to me is to run the library with Optimise Storage enabled, and created a second user account (same AppleID) with the full library stored on an external HDD, so that’s what I’m going to try
@BenRiceM that’s a cool idea. Yeah I have a huge library as well, and bit the bullet on fast, larger external storage a while back. My library was big even before iCloud Photos was really a thing (back in the Aperture days!), and I never imagined I could seriously consider it as the main home for my photos. But I’m glad there is a workflow that could work now!