In Photos for macOS, it’s easy to set up multiple libraries. You may want to separate projects, travel and work, and personal media, or have so many images and videos that a single library feels unmanageable. With multiple libraries, you can also have a specific library wherever you want, they don’t have to live on your home volume. You can store them on other partitions, other mounted volumes, or external drives that you keep offline for storage. (To create an additional library, quit Photos if it’s running, hold down the Option key while starting Photos, click Create newand choose a location.)
However, there is a significant limitation if you choose to use more than one library: only one library at a time can be set up to work with iCloud Photos and get all the benefits of multi-device sync and cloud storage and access. . Apple has never stated any desire to change this, and I’m guessing we wouldn’t see any movement until late 2023, even if the company wanted to allow multiple iCloud Photo Libraries.
However, you can follow one of several alternative strategies:
- Combine your libraries: The simplest course of action is to have a monolithic library if you want all your libraries to be in sync. If you have reasons to keep them apart, this is not an answer of course. And Apple doesn’t offer library merging. For that, turn to PowerPhotos 2 ($29.95), recently reviewed.
- Create multiple accounts: While you can only sync a single Photos library with iCloud Photos, that’s a limitation of your macOS and Apple ID account. You can create multiple Apple ID and macOS accounts, and register each of your additional macOS accounts to different Apple ID accounts. For each macOS account, choose a different library to sync. Management here would be difficult but it would work. Disadvantages? You must switch between macOS accounts or iCloud.com logins to view images; you don’t get automatic syncing from your iPhone, iPad, or other Macs to every account; and you may have to pay iCloud+ storage tiers for each Apple ID if you have more than 50 GB of media in each library.
- Use other cloud-based photo libraries: If you’re committed to using Photos as your media interface, this won’t work. But you could turn to Google Photos. Google also doesn’t allow multiple libraries. But because you manage all your settings through a web app, you can tag images to create large albums or album sets that could double as library dividers.
This Mac 911 article is a response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Greg.
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