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by coder543 1250 days ago
If macOS is installed on it, Photos won’t even think of it as an external drive.

However, yes, you can: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201517

2 comments

Big question for me is - how will it behave when you also use icloud photos as well? And what if it's an encrypted disk?

I'm asking because of the following:

Let's say your laptop is 1TB, but everything except photos and for example dropbox is under 512gb.

If you then need to restore, your new laptop has to be able to contain the full restore (1TB, or whatever is used). This also means you can't just run to the store an get a standard model (instead of built-to-order) and restore, unless you buy something that has enough storage.

Having multiple apfs volumes helps here, and I'd love to have all cloud storage off of my main one.

I’m not recommending any of this for laptop users, at all.

If the external drive won’t be connected 100% of the time, there are all sorts of headaches that can occur because Apple doesn’t really design their software to handle intermittently available disks, in my experience, except (for obvious reasons) for Time Machine.

Even Time Machine has issues with intermittently available disks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33762254.
Oh, I see. I thought of MacOS installed on the internal drive, supported by an external drive for extra storage. Thanks.
Photos would work that way too, as shown in the help article I linked.