Organizing and managing photos on Mac with external hard drive

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Level 1

8 points

Organizing and managing photos on Mac with external hard drive

Hey everyone!

I am a little confused on how to organize, store, and manage my photos on my computer/external hard drive. I'll try to explain what I am doing currently. I have a WD My Passport external hard drive that I have to store my photos so I don't fill up my Macbook Air (only 128 GB of storage on it).

On the external hard drive, I have multiple folders of photos (organized by month and year) I took with my basic Camp Snap camera. Clicking on the folders, it is impossible to scroll through them using just Finder on my Mac. I need to go through the Photos application. I have instructed for my Photo library with Photos to be saved on my external hard drive, so when I open my external hard drive, I have a bunch of folders and it shows the Photoslibrary flowery icon there, as well.

So, are my photos that are stored in the folders copied twice, in that they are within the Photos application, too? I think I'm better off using the Photos app because it is much too cumbersome looking at my pictures on my Mac clicking on each one, and opening it with the ColorSync Utility. I guess my issue is that my folders are so disorganized being in folders and within the Photos library on the external hard drive. I don't know if the Photos app has all my pictures plus all of my pictures in the various folders I created on the external hard drive.

It's all messy and I don't know who to ask to make it more organized and easy to scroll and view in a organized sequential, ordered way, throughout the months and years.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated to make is more enjoyable and less confusing for me.

Thanks, everyone!

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Managing photos on Mac

Posted on Oct 4, 2025 8:13 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 4, 2025 8:44 AM in response to Churchburger

In Photos' Settings>General, there is a checkbox

that says "Copy Items to the Photos Library." This box should always be checked! It is checked by default, so there's usually no reason to worry. (Photos just doesn't work well otherwise, and not checking it has caused people big problems. I'm not sure why it's there.)

This ensures that all the pictures that you see in Photos are contained completely in the Photos Library package. When we copy pictures into Photos, the files are copied, that is duplicated, so that we can keep the original files as a safe backup, usually on a separate drive. Those original Finder files don't need to be available to Photos at all.

Finder is a File Management System. Photos is a non-destructive Image Management System. A File Management system like Finder relies on filenames, file created date, file modified dates, file extensions, and so on. In Finder you can sort files in folders using those things, for instance, but not by content, because the content in different files is so different. None of that is useful in Image Management. Pictures have similar content, and so their management depends on Capture Dates, Titles, Captions, Faces, Keywords, Objects, Locations, text, and things that are parts of pictures but that aren't in files at all-- and there are lots of organizing options in Photos using those image attributes. Since pictures aren't necessarily in files, then sorting pictures by file date or file name doesn't make sense.

Photos is "non-destructive," because it never changes the original picture file that's loaded in. When you edit a picture, add captions, and other stuff, none of that changes the original file. All those changes are recorded in a database, and what you see is the original picture with the changes added. That picture never exists as a file, until you export it as one. So Photos doesn't change the original picture, and it doesn't use space with extra edited copies. (It does keep thumbnails and preview versions to speed up viewing.)

So, we keep our original files as backups on separate disk drives. But Photos is a much better way of handling pictures than Finder.

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

215,196 points

Oct 4, 2025 9:52 AM in response to Churchburger

First what system are you running on your MBA?

How much free space do you have on your MBA?

How is the external WD drive formatted? What is its capacity?

Is the WD drive an HDD or an SDD? If an HDD is it self powered?

Do you have Time Machine setup to backup your MBA AND the WD external? That's a must.

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