Photos Get your photos in order ready for the upgrade
An easy way to maintain a central photo collection is by importing every photo you take into macOS’ Photos app. In Photos
> Preferences > General, tick ‘Copy items to the Photos library’, then add pics from a connected camera or SD card using File
> Import (or just by dragging). Your Photos Library is stored by default in the Pictures folder for your macOS user account and included in your Time Machine backups (see page 22).
To bring your iOS devices to the party, use iCloud Photo Library. Open Settings, tap your name at the top, tap iCloud and turn on Photos. All photos you take will now be added to your iCloud Photo Library, stored on Apple’s servers. On your Mac, tick Photos in System Preferences > iCloud, and in the Photos app tick Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Photo Library and Download Originals to This Mac. Now all those photos are also stored permanently in your library, and in
turn your whole library is synced for viewing on all your devices.
Optimise storage
Two caveats. First, deleting a photo anywhere deletes it everywhere – don’t forget! Second, space can be an issue. It only works if you have enough room in your iCloud plan (see Settings > your name > iCloud > Manage Storage) for your entire library. You can tick the Optimise Storage option in the iCloud > Photos settings on each device so its built-in storage doesn’t fill up with copies of all your photos: instead, you’ll see lowresolution previews until you open an image, which downloads the original from the cloud. If your Mac‘s internal drive doesn’t have room, that’s a bigger problem: you’ll need to keep your master copy elsewhere (see below).
If you’ve brought photos haphazardly into your library over time, you may have duplicates. Although the Photos app detects duplicates during import, it’s easily fooled when the same pic arrives with any kind of difference, such as a change in file format. Various third-party apps can trawl through your library and remove identical pics, but these aren’t completely reliable either. Apple has flagged a new de-duplication option in Photos for macOS Catalina, so the best plan might be to wait to see if this helps.