ICloud – How to copy all photos from Photos App to an external drive

There are two main options which I would go for:

• Put your library and contents on a network volume

  This is the option that I went for on my setup, mainly because I did not consider the second option at that point in time. This option works fine for me — even when the network drops (which is pretty rare): the data transfer pauses and continues when the network reconnects.

  This works fine for my relatively large Aperture library, but I see no reason for this not to work in iPhoto.

  ✓ Easy to set up, just copy your entire library to a network drive and ⌥-launch iPhoto
  ✓ Uses no space on your local machine
  ✗ Possibly susceptible to network dropouts causing problems

• Put your library on your local machine and the contents on a network volume

  This alternative is probably better, but requires that you switch to Aperture. This way, you keep the library on your local machine but the media is stored on a network drive. This means that it uses very little space on your local machine but even if the network drops there is no chance of corruption/etc.

  ✓ Much less likely to have problems due to network dropouts
  ✓ Uses very little space on your local machine
  ✗ Does use some space on your local machine
  ✗ Harder to set up — not as simple as just copying your entire library

Perhaps a little bit late for esaruoho's friend but might be useful for someone else.

FatCatSoftware, who created the iPhoto Library Manager that esaruoho linked above, have created a similar application for managing Photos.app libraries called PowerPhotos.

For this situation I would go with option 1.

• Convert the iPhoto Library to a Photos.app library.
• Combine the two Photos.app libraries into one by using PowerPhotos.
• Run a duplicate image check using PowerPhotos in order to make sure there are no duplicates.
• Upload images to iCloud.