Originally Posted by
torbjornhb Thanks.
Great post. It could be an option to make another Photos library on an external hard drive. But what will happen to the pictures on my current Library of i choose to use another library on an external drive?
Your current library remains untouched. You can always open it again by option-clicking the Photos app int he dock, or, of course, you can always delete the library file and never use it again.
Originally Posted by
torbjornhb And if I do so, would it be the case that the originals are kept on the external drive and on iCloud, and my mac (Photos) will show the smaller preview photos? And then I can easily download them to Photos from iCloud as long as I have Internet connection?
Unfortunately, iCloud Photos only connects to whatever you designate as the System Library. That would be nice if it would work.
Maybe your best option instead is to use iCloud Photos on your Mac with optimized storage and then once a week/month/whatever period works for you, export the photos from the Photos app to an external drive for archival "just in case".
If you export a Live Photo as unmodified, it exports two files - a jpeg and a mov (video) file. I haven't looked, but I assume that there are tools that can re-establish them as Live Photos if you need to import them back.