fotogs: internal or external hard drive?

[robfilms]

i am almost finished migrating from my steady eddie mac pro 3,1 to a 2015 i7 retina with 4gb graphics card.

i have the model with the 3tb hybrid hard drive.

there appears to be plenty of storage.

this will be a work machine focused on running my small media production company so i'll be using final cut pro x to edit motion footage, resolve to color correct that footage, apple's photo to manage my stills library and luminar & affinity to be my stills edit platform.

my question is about where to store the stills library.

most of my motion footage is housed on dedicated hard drives that eventually get re-formatted for future work.

but the stills library has always resided on my internal hard drive within the mac pro with a dedicated second mac pro hard drive being the backup.

i now have that backup as the external stills image hard drive with my imac.

do i transfer the stills to the imac's 3tb drive for convenience and speed?

do i retain the stills library on an external drive to "save" space on the 3tb imac and create separate hard drive as a backup?

what do other folks do with their large photo libraries?

thanks in advance to those who care to share.

be well.

rob

[Gareth]

I use Lightroom for photo management and I keep recent stills on my "internal SSD" for speed and within DropBox for syncing (and one of many backups) across multiple computers. Since I have different sized SSD's on different machines, I mean I keep the number of photos on the "internal SSD" small enough to sync across all my machines.

When I'm done editing, they get "archived" into another folder which removes them from DropBox and puts them on a personal cloud NAS so that they can still be synced if needed when I hook up an external drive to my laptop.

[jdc]

How big is the library? And how big will it get in the future? Did it ever "stall" or feel slow in your MP?

For "convenience" sure, internal is fine, as long as there is enough room.

Although the Fusion drive is "fast" for many things, data like files are moved around at HDD speeds, not flash drive speeds. Since its not a single flash drive.

You could easily go external. Despending on size/budget, I think you have several options.

[modelamac]

I have that iMac, but have an Apple Fusion 2 TB drive in it.

If I were in your shoes I'd use the internal drive as storage, have a similar sized external for cloning/backup, and operate off an external 500 GB SSD connected by USB3 or Thunderbolt. I have all Thunderbolt external drives, and booting off these is as fast or faster than the internal.

Just one man's opinion.

[ka jowct]

I am hanging onto my 2010 Mac Pro and its beefy internal and external storage. Redundant image backups.

[Ombligo]

If you need true backup - it will need to be offsite.

[jdc]

So what did u decide?

[robfilms]

jdc-

i ended up dragging BOTH the photos library AND the iphotos library to the external hard drive.

i then dragged this "new" picture folder on the imac.

i rebooted and then launched photos on the imac.

it then asked me to direct it to either the photo library or an aperture library.

(actually, i never had aperture installed so there must be an embedded folder named aperture library in either photos or iphoto)

i picked the photo library and it has been working nicely ever since.

i very much toyed with the notion of keeping the photos library on the external drive and not fill the imac with 500gb worth of data but decided that ease of access was worth the space.

i am now in the process of running both carbon copy cloner and then time machine to backup the imac internal drive which i can now happily report contains my entire photo library.

be well.

rob