unable to access photos on seagate external drive

[Brooke]

Ok bear with me as I am very much technologically impaired, but figured someone on here may be able to help.
A while back, my disk ran out of storage space because my photo library was too large, at least I figured that was the issue. I purchased a Seagate Backup Plus Drive and moved my photo library and my iPhoto library, a little less than 50 GB total, to the drive. I did as they told me at the store, the photos are on the drive and so I deleted them from my computer which immediately freed up room. Now, however, I cannot seem to access the photos on the drive. The icons for the two libraries are there, but when I click them, a message comes asking "which photo library would you like iPhoto to use?" There are no libraries listed. There is an option to "create new library," but doesn't that move all the photos back onto your computer? I'm pretty sure I tried that, and as it was loading it was stopped because my computer did not have enough room to load them all. Like I said, I really know nothing about computers, but I just want to be able to look through the photos on my external drive as icons and pick and choose the ones I want and move them to my laptop. Is there a way to do this?

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

I did as they told me at the store,

Did you do the following?


1) Copy the Photos Library by dragging it from the start up volume to your external volume.

2) When complete, hold down the Option key and launch Photos.

3) In Photos, select Photos > Preferences, and in the General tab, click Use as System Photo Library

Remember that holding down the Command key when you drag files or folders from one volume to another first copies the files, and then deletes them from the original. Only follow this course if you’re sure you have a good backup of the original.