Apple seems to make photo storage a confusing thing and I'm fairly tech savvy, what are the options?

[Guest /u/toesbluee]

I take a lot of photos on my iPhone. It fills up my storage so fast. I prefer to turn off the iCloud for photos because I simply don't have enough storage and paying even the 10/month top off offering doesn't really make any sense in my case. (I also just genuinely think the iCloud is quite confusing. Like I get it, but I also find it hard to figure out when I have like 8 different apple devices)

 

I use external hard drives routinely for camera photos and rarely store many files on my MacBook directly. in the past I would send all my images to my MacBook and put them in the photos app there but my photos app started also taking up too much storage of the computer and ran into the same issue. (I have like probably over 30gb of iPhone photos and videos currently on my MacBook)

 

So basically I later started moving all phone photos off my iPhone and into separate folders to be stored only on the external drives. This worked obviously, as it's how I store my camera images, however, I love that with the iPhone photos app on my iPhone I can see a map of all places I took a photo and recall images based on the location and time. Also just generally the sorting features with faces and type ect. Its helpful. None of this information is translated when it's just in a folder viewed from my MacBook and without a proper photo stream it's hard to really cull and sort these iPhone snapshots that aren't being uploaded into an editing software.

 

Is there a solution to having external photos app 'catalogs' of sorts? I know many years ago iPhoto would allow you to store albums in a diff location and then just recall the app when the drive was plugged in.

 

What I really want is one external drive to serve as my "photos stream" So when I plug it in and recall it on my MacBook it opens it opens it up in the photos app but then I unplug it it's not stored there. I kinda do this now but with my iPad.

 

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