How to Designate a System Photo Library in PhotosĪs briefly mentioned earlier, designating a System Photo Library works best to share your photos on different platforms or devices. However, it is only essential if you have more than one library. To make it easier for other apps to easily access all the photos and videos that you want to share, it would be better if you designate a System Photo Library. And if it’s not, then the first photo library that you create will automatically become the System Photo Library. Now, if you think that you have only one photo library, then it's your default System Photo Library. Only then will you be able to select them in System Preferences. What’s System Photo LibraryĮven when you want to set your image as your screensaver or desktop picture, the photo needs to be in your System Photo Library.
Moreover, it allows you to sync photos on IOS devices and view all your precious collections on Apple TV.
With the assistance of this incredible tool, you can easily access various Mac applications, including iMovie, Pages, Keynote, and more. It’s a useful library application feature of the Mac computers that can be used with iCloud Photos, My Photo Stream, and Shared Albums. If you are a MacBook user, you might be familiar with the term System Photo Library. Part 3: Tips to Protect System Photo Library.Part 2: How to Find the System Photo Library on Photos.
Otherwise, choose Home from the Finder’s Go menu ( Go > Home) or press Shift-Command-H. Depending on your Finder settings, this may be as easy as simply opening a new Finder window. Open your home folder (/Users/ yourusername) in the Finder. (I came up with-no joke- 19 ways to view the folder in Lion and Mountain Lion.) But in Mavericks and Yosemite, Apple has made the task much more convenient, providing an easily accessible setting for toggling the visibility of your user-level Library folder. If you’re still running Lion or Mountain Lion, making the ~/Library folder requires a little bit of work. Mavericks now offers a simple setting to make the ~/Library folder visible. You just need to know how to make the folder visible again. Luckily, as I mentioned, the folder is merely hidden, using a special file attribute called the hidden flag. While I understand Apple’s motives here-I’ve had to troubleshoot more than a few Macs on which an inexperienced user has munged the contents of ~/Library-a user can have plenty of valid reasons for needing to access the personal Library folder. This is the same reason Apple has always hidden the folders containing OS X’s Unix underpinnings: /bin, /sbin, /usr, and the like. The reason for this move is presumably that people unfamiliar with the inner workings of OS X often open ~/Library and start rooting around, moving and deleting files, only to later discover that programs don’t work right, application settings are gone, or-worse-data is missing. It’s just that, starting in Lion, and continuing in Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite, Apple has made the folder invisible. But rest assured, regardless of your version of OS X, your personal Library folder is right where it’s always been, at the root level of your Home folder. The folder was gone.Īt least, that’s how it appears. Whatever the case may have been, up until Lion (OS X 10.7), you simply opened your Home folder to access the Library folder.īut after upgrading to Lion, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and yes even OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the first time you tried accessing your personal Library folder, you likely found…well, you didn’t find. Or maybe a developer asked you to delete a preference file, or grab a log file, while troubleshooting a program.
Perhaps you wanted to tweak something using a tip from Macworld, Mac OS X Hints, or elsewhere on the Web. The files and folders in ~/Library are generally meant to be left alone, but if you’ve been using OS X for a while, chances are you’ve delved inside.
Inside your home folder is a Library folder-commonly written in Unix syntax as ~/Library, which means “a folder named Library at the root level of your home folder.” This folder is accessible only to you, and it’s used to store your personal settings, application-support files, and, in some cases, data.