Using Media Browser pics stored on External Drive

[evtonic3]

I have my entire library on an external hard drive. I should point out that I have been waiting for it to populate 36,000 photos, so should I be waiting more than 10 hours for this? Or is this a bug? Do I need to manually add the library again? Please any help would be good here.

[DWright]

Hi evtonic3,

 

The Media Browser will need to scan your external to populate the thumbnails in the browser and with these many photos it will take a long time to complete. With these many photos it may be quicker you the File>Open with the thumbnail layout enabled to select the required photo.

[evtonic3]

Hi evtonic3,

 

The Media Browser will need to scan your external to populate the thumbnails in the browser and with these many photos it will take a long time to complete. With these many photos it may be quicker you the File>Open with the thumbnail layout enabled to select the required photo.

 

Understood, what exact folder would be the right one? I know there's a few inside the Photos Icon folder. And what folder exactly (screen capture) I have always had these two folders that it has been documented that they both essential to a migrated library from back when they introduced Photos. I think newer Macs that came with the new Photos app installed don't see these two folders.

[R C-R]

Regardless of the method used (Affinity media browser or File > Open > Media > Photos) it will still take a lot of time to scan a 200+GB Photos Library of 36K photos. What you see in either one is not a folder but the System Photo (or current iPhoto) library, which is really a complex structure of multiple files & folders (a package, in Apple terminology).

 

For a Photos System library, once the initial access has finished (which can take several seconds even for a modest sized library stored on an internal drive) you should see all the same categories as you do in the Photos sidebar -- Moments, Collections,Years, Places, Albums, etc. Each of those items is subdivided into smaller groups just like it is in the Photos sidebar. Since that depends on how your photos are organized & categorized in Photos, there is no way to tell you which is the best or fastest one to find the photo you want.

 

Regarding which of the top level libraries are essential, it depends. If you had the old iPhoto library installed on the system startup drive, when you first opened Photos & it "migrated" that to a Photos library, it would not have duplicated anything -- it just would have created links to the original iPhoto files in the new Photos one, as described here. However, when the old iPhoto library is not on the startup drive, things get complicated. The links created are hard links (not aliases or symbolic links), which can't span different file systems. So either the migrated library is created on the same drive as the old iPhoto one & there are no duplicates, or (more often) it is created on the startup drive & everything is duplicated.

 

Likewise, if you move the library from a drive that is using hard links between the iPhoto & Photos libraries on to a different drive, the hard links won't work & Photos creates a Photos library that duplicates everything to the destination drive. Also note that the hard link creation thing only works during the initial migration -- anything added to either library after that is unique to that library.