How to Back up your Photos library

1 Find your photos

Unless you’ve moved it, your photo library lives in your user account’s Pictures folder. So, it’ll be in /Macintosh HD/Users/[your username]/Pictures. It’s a package, not a folder – meaning it appears like one file, but isn’t really.

2 Open it up

To see the package’s contents, ≈- click on it and choose Show Package Contents. You should see the structure shown here. The actual photographs are stored under Masters and then organised by year and month.

3 Be aware of formats

If you might open image backups in an app other than Photos, check what file formats that app can open. Since iOS 11 and High Sierra, some of your pictures may be stored as HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format), not JPEG.

4 Drag to a drive

If you want to back up your entire Photos library, just drag and drop it to a location on an external drive. Don’t use a USB flash drive/memory stick: they’re often too low in capacity and, though handy and portable, they’re easy to lose.

5 Go pro

If you want to automatically backup your photo library, we would thoroughly recommend using a dedicated backup app, such as the popular Carbon Copy Cloner. This app is free for 30 days, so you can try out all its features. 6 Select the source We’d recommend backing up

everything that’s important, of course, and Carbon Copy Cloner can do exactly that. Here, though, we’re concentrating on our Photos library; once again we’re selecting it from our Pictures folder.

7 Set a schedule

One of Carbon Copy Cloner’s best features is its scheduler, which doesn’t just schedule backups but also enables you to wake your Mac if it’s asleep, or defer a backup if something else is using the same destination at that time.

8 Say where to go

We’ve set our source. We’ve also set our backup schedule. Now it’s time to choose our backup’s destination. Backing up to the same drive is a bad idea: hard disks can and do fail. Here we’ve attached and selected an external SSD.

9 Set it off

If your Photos library is enormous, like ours, this would be a good time to go and make a cup of tea: backing up gigabytes of data is slow even on speedy external drives. This is why automation is such a great idea.