Can i store and access iphotos library on external hard drive (and still have it backup to my cloud network)?
This is one of those &quot;fun&quot; non-discoverable Apple settings that you would only know if you knew about this setting already. Yah catch-22. Anyway.

Copy the photoslibrary file to the drive you want to store it on.
While holding the Option key, launch the Photos.app

Instead of Photos.app opening, you will get something like this


Click on the Other Library button and point it to the photos library you just copied to your external drive.

It will open that file and set it as the default, so that the next time you open photos.app it will open that file again. You can verify that by renaming or moving the one in the old default location and launching photos.app normally.