Can I keep ONLY optimized iCloud photos on a second Mac?

[Anders P. A.]

I have a Desktop iMac with my primary Photos library and a Mac Book Pro where i would like access to all my photos.

If my my primary library on the iMac is synced with iCloud Photos and I enable iCloud Photos on my Mac Book Pro with "optimized photos" turned on, how will photos sync?

From what I can gather it seems my Mac Book Pro would get filled with full res photos up to a certain point – and from then on only optimized photos would get synced. What if I ONLY want optimized photos on my Mac Book Pro – Is that possible?

Thanks
Anders

 

[spitf1r3]

I have a Desktop iMac with my primary Photos library and a Mac Book Pro where i would like access to all my photos.

If my my primary library on the iMac is synced with iCloud Photos and I enable iCloud Photos on my Mac Book Pro with "optimized photos" turned on, how will photos sync?

From what I can gather it seems my Mac Book Pro would get filled with full res photos up to a certain point – and from then on only optimized photos would get synced. What if I ONLY want optimized photos on my Mac Book Pro – Is that possible?

Thanks
Anders

Yes - that's what the setting is for. You could even have your photos 'optimized' on all your devices - after adding a photo to the library device would upload the photo to the cloud, and then just keep the 'optimized' (low-resolution) photo locally.

 

[MacGizmo]

What if I ONLY want optimized photos on my Mac Book Pro – Is that possible?

It's possible, and it sounds like you have it set up to do exactly what you want. I have my iMac set up to keep the high-res originals, but my other Macs, my iPhone, and my iPad all have "optimized" copies of the photos stored (essentially they are thumbnails appropriately optimized to the specific devices). Keep in mind that depending on the original library size, this can still be a substantial amount. My 30GB+ library still takes up about 5GB of my iPhone for instance.

The main piece of advice I can give you is to set one Mac (probably your iMac) as the primary, with Download Originals to this Mac turned on.