external hard drive for MacBook

paulsm

why are Macs so complicated? I have bought an external hdd for my MacBook and transferred photos across as shown on the net, so I checked something before deleting all the photos on the Mac by deleting 1 photo in "photos" app but when I checked the external drive it had deleted it there as well. How do I delete the photos from the MacBook without deleting them from the external drive too?

cx6

Sounds as if you have some sort of 'sync' turned on (ie the Mac and the external drive are kept 'in step')

I am not a Mac user so cannot advise how to turn it off

tempus_fugit

Nowt complicated about Macs. You copy the phots and paste them onto the external drive. If you did this then the copies should still be there. Did you use Time Machine or something to save them to the drive?

cx6

I think the OP is saying they did that successfully, but when they then deleted one from the Mac it also deleted it from the external HDD - as if some kind of sync was enabled.

TadleyBaggie

cx6 said:

I think the OP is saying they did that successfully, but when they then deleted one from the Mac it also deleted it from the external HDD - as if some kind of sync was enabled.

There is nothing like that by default built into MacOS, there may be 3rd party apps that do that. 

Grandad2b

If I remember correctly it's all to do with your Photos library. If you have iCloud it can get really complicated since the default behaviour is to automatically sync your computer or library with your iCloud account.

Best option might be to see if there's a Mac User Group local to you: you'll get better help there.

paulsm

update, I copied the "photos library" to the ext hdd then deleted the photos on the Mac which was good, I could browse the photos on the ext hdd also good but when I tried to use the ext hdd to list items on ebay I navigated to "photos library" on the ext hdd clicked on that but it didnt open to navigate to individual photos instead it stalled for ages & ebay sort of timed out, the same with trying to put a photo on Facebook from the ext hdd you can only navigate to "photos library" but if I click on the ext hdd on my desktop I can view all the photos.