Create and Manage Multiple Photos Libraries

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can manage multiple photos libraries on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m looking at my Photos app here, and all of my photos are located in my library, as you most likely know. Well, where are these on my Mac? Where are the actual photos and videos that are contained in this library? Where are they on my mac? Well they’re contained in a library. This is in your Pictures folder. I’m going to close this, go ahead and close this window here. And now we’re going to open up a new Finder window. When I am looking at all of my folders here, you’re going to see I have a folder for Pictures.

Within this Pictures folder is your library. So this is where all of my photos are. You’re going to see that this library here is about six gigabyte. On my personal library, where I have roughly 150,00 to 160,000 photos and videos, this is about 150 gigabyte. All of my photos, all of my videos, are located within this library. So if I were to double click on this, what it would do is open up my Photos app, and I’m looking at all of my photos.

Now we can have multiple photo libraries. In other words, I could have one for my personal photos, as well as my work photos. So how do we do that? Well the first thing we need to do is close our Photos app. Now what we do is we go down to our Dock, where we have our Photos app, you’ll want to have your Photos app in the Dock. And if you hold down the option key and then click on this to open it up, so I’m holding down my option key and I click on it, we get a dialog box where we have my library. From here, what we’re able to do is create a new library.

Now, once I create a new library, I can also choose which library I want to open up. So let’s go ahead and create a new library here. I just click on Create. I name it. We’re just going to call this Work. It’s going to be placed in my Pictures folder. I could change where it is going to be located, but I’m going to leave it in my Pictures. I click on okay, and now we have my new library. We do not have any photos or videos in this library because it is brand new. I just created this. So now what I’m able to do is import photos in here, and it will be located in this library.

Let’s go take a look at that folder again, I’m going to quit out of here and if we look, you’re going to see we have two libraries. I have my personal one, which is my photos library, and then I have my work one. I want to open up my personal one. Again, all I have to do is just double click on this and now it opens up my personal one. I want to open up my work one. I go back over to this folder here. I double click on work and it opens up my work one.

I could do the same thing by option clicking the Photos app, and we get that little dialog box where I could create a new library. I could select which library I want to open up through there, but I find the easiest way is to just double click on the library in the Pictures folder.

Now, when you do have multiple libraries and you’re using iCloud photo library, where you store all of your photos in iCloud, you can only have one library connected to iCloud. You cannot store multiple libraries in iCloud. So in my case here, I have my photos library connected to iCloud. So I can access those photos, those videos on my iPhone, on my iPad. I can not do the same thing with my work library. I can only do this with one library.

If you want to see which one is your iCloud library, what you need to do is open up that dialogue box again. So now what I’m going to do is hold down the option key and click. We have my library here and you’re going to see one of them says System Photo Library. It’s grayed out here, but this is telling me that this is the library that is connected to iCloud because it’s my System Photo Library. So, if you need to see which one, if you have multiple libraries, and you need to see which one is connected to iCloud, this is how you can do it.

If your library is not showing up here, let’s say you created one and it is not showing up here. What you may need to do a select Other Library and then open it up from there. Once you open it up, it’ll remember it, and then you can access it from this dialog box.

So that’s how you can manage multiple photo libraries on the Mac. All of your photos and videos are stored in a library by default, you’re going to have one library. If you hold down the option key and click on the Photos app in the Dock, you’re going to get a dialogue box where you can create a new library. Name your library, and then when you open it up, it’s going to show all of the photos and videos from that library. If you do create multiple libraries, you can only have one of them connect to iCloud. To see which one is connected to iCloud, you just go back to that dialog box and see which one says System Photo Library.

So that’s how we can manage multiple libraries, multiple Photos libraries on the Mac.