What is the Photos Library and how the Photos app uses it

In this video, we’re going to look at where the Photos app actually stores your photos and videos on your Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m looking at my Photos app. We can see that we have a number of different photos and videos in here. Where are these actually stored on the Mac? Well, let’s find out. What I’m going to do is I’m going to close this. So let’s just go up under Photos here, and let’s quit out of it.

Where are all those photos and videos stored? Well, they’re stored in a special file. If I go down to my Finder here, when we’re looking at our Home folder, I’m looking at my Home folder here Dan’s Tutorials. This is where I have all of my different files and folders, my documents, my desktop, my downloads.

Also, if you look here, you’re going to see we have a Pictures folder. This is where all of those pictures and videos are stored. It’s stored in a special document here. So let’s go ahead and open this up by double click on it. And if we look here, you’re going to see I have photos library. This is where the actual photos and videos are stored. They’re all within this one photos library. We can see that this photos library, in my case here is, 314 megabytes. That’s because all of those photos and videos are stored within this library here. I go and add a new photo, a new video to the Photos app; it’s going to be contained within this library here.

You’re also going to see that I have a work photos library. We can have multiple photos library. I have a separate video on that, but by default, you’re going to see one library here called photos library.

Now being that all of the photos and videos are stored on this library. This also means that if you wanted to create an easy backup of all your photos libraries, all you have to do is just drag this one file here over to an external hard drive. And when you do that, it’s going to copy all of your photos and videos that are in the Photos app to that second hard drive because they’re all contained within this one file.

You can get into this folder if you want to see all of the originals, but I would highly recommend not doing that. But if you did just want to take a peak, all you have to do is just hold down the control key and click, and you’re going to see Show Package Contents. This is going to open up that document in a folder. And now we can see all of the folders. In here, within these folders, are going to be all of your images. But again, I would highly recommend that you do not do this.

So that’s where all of your photos and videos are stored within the Photos app. They’re just stored in a document called your photos library, and you can create more than one library. By default, this is going to be located in your pictures folder of your Home folder. Any photos and videos that you add to your photos app will be added to that file in there automatically. If you want it to move that file or all of your photos and videos to an external hard drive, all you have to do is just take that one file that library and move it to an external hard drive. It’s an easy way to backup all of your photos and videos.

So that’s where the Photos app stores all of your photos and videos on the Mac.