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kb1858's avatar
kb1858
New member | Level 2
7 years ago

Uploading albums from Apple Photos to Dropbox for Back up

Hi   I am trying to sort out cloud storage for my photos.  They are on Apple Photos on a Mac running Sierra 10.12.6.  I already have an external harddrive on which they are regularly backed up.  ...
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  • Jay's avatar
    Jay
    7 years ago
    Hi Kate, most likely this won’t work since the Photos app is a database of its own (hence why we don’t recommend syncing it to Dropbox).
     
    However, in Photos, you should be able to export the album, or the photos out of that app into the Dropbox folder. This will copy the photos, not just move them, so you will be duplicating the space used on your Mac the more photos you copy over.
     
    Hope this clarifies matters!
Jay's avatar
Jay
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
Hi Kate, most likely this won’t work since the Photos app is a database of its own (hence why we don’t recommend syncing it to Dropbox).
 
However, in Photos, you should be able to export the album, or the photos out of that app into the Dropbox folder. This will copy the photos, not just move them, so you will be duplicating the space used on your Mac the more photos you copy over.
 
Hope this clarifies matters!
Snappy23's avatar
Snappy23
Explorer | Level 4
5 years ago

Photos Takeout, an app on the Mac app store, does exactly this. It can export album-wise, year-wise or moment/date-wise folders from Photos on Mac to Dropbox, other cloud services, Mac or external HD. I use it on Big Sur, but it works on older macOSs too. It can also export incrementally i.e. photos added and edited since the last export.

If this works for you, please mark this as the correct answer so that it can also help others.

 

PS: You can also export one album at a time with Photos app by selecting all photos in the album, then clicking File / Export in the top menu (Don't use Drag & drop because it'll export JPG versions and exclude some of the metadata).

  • kb1858's avatar
    kb1858
    New member | Level 2
    5 years ago

    Thanks Snappy that's helpful.  I'll take a look.  The dropbox solution took up too much local disk space so I went with Apple photos and several external harddrive backups in the end.

     

     

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