Optimize Photos

[jclin10]

I have about 50,000 photos and 3200 videos in my iCloud account. It ends up occupying about 260-280GB on my MacBook Pro, even with the optimize setting in Photos.

Does that sound right? I’d like to further optimize it if possible. I’m not sure I need to be walking around with 260-280GB of photos!

 

[kitKAC]

How much space does your library take up in iCloud?

 

[jclin10]

435GB

 

[kitKAC]

It sounds like the optimise function is doing its job then.

 

[jclin10]

Thanks. I was hoping I could optimize further!

 

[Ruggy]

Do you need to keep them on the mac at all?
Back them up to a HD from the cloud for safety and just access them from the cloud when you need them.

 

[adrianlondon]

The optimise function will reduce the amount stored locally if/when you start running out of space.

Works the same way on macOS and iOS.

 

[jclin10]

Do you need to keep them on the mac at all?
Back them up to a HD from the cloud for safety and just access them from the cloud when you need them.

That's an interesting idea that never occurred to me. I mostly just take pics with my iPhone and those photos just stay there in the cloud and get downloaded everywhere.

Is there a way to filter which kinds of photos get downloaded?

 

[jclin10]

The optimise function will reduce the amount stored locally if/when you start running out of space.

Works the same way on macOS and iOS.

Thanks. So it basically just fills up your computer until you run out of space? Is there a way to set aside a certain amount of space on your hard drive so it doesn't fill the entire hard drive?

 

[BanjoDudeAhoy]

That's an interesting idea that never occurred to me. I mostly just take pics with my iPhone and those photos just stay there in the cloud and get downloaded everywhere.

Is there a way to filter which kinds of photos get downloaded?

Depends on what you mean by "which kinds".

You can export unmodified originals or the modified photos.
Or, if that's what you mean, you can export by album, individual photos or just select all and export them. That could take a good while with your collection, of course.

 

[macman4789]

My understanding is the photos that are in your Photos app when scrolling though etc are very low res almost thumbnail like. Only when you double click on them will they download the full resolution version e.g. 12mp from an iPhone 12.

So if you’ve got 200GB+ locally on your drive, it may be that you are accessing quite a lot of the photos on your Mac? So it is downloading them from the cloud? I’ve got a very large library of media however with optimise storage, the proportion of my library stored locally is nowhere near 250+GB. It only downloads what I physically access to edit/view etc. the rest are like thumbnails.

 

[maxoakland]

It sounds like the optimise function is doing its job then.

Why does it still take up so much space if it's "optimized"? This is an issue I'm having myself

 

[maxoakland]

The optimise function will reduce the amount stored locally if/when you start running out of space.

Works the same way on macOS and iOS.

The problem is it doesn't seem to actually do that. On my iPad, photos is taking up 19GB and I'm constantly getting messages that the iPad is out of memory but the Photos space never goes down

It even asked me if I wanted to temporarily uninstall apps when I installed the recent software update because it didn't have enough room to install it. But Photos doesn't seem to respond to low storage space. At least not in a way that makes sense/is helpful

 

[AlmightyKang]

Alternative idea...

Do you need to keep 280Gb of photos in the first place?

Think of who is going to have to inherit that and look after it one day.

(Only saying that because I've been there. I'm at 94Gb now)

 

[jclin10]

Why does it still take up so much space if it's "optimized"? This is an issue I'm having myself

Yeah, that’s my question. My photos on my laptop take up less space than what is in the cloud, but it still takes up a lot of space

 

[jclin10]

As it turns out, I have another computer (that I recently purchased) that syncs with the same iCloud account. Photos only take up 28GB. It is also set to "optimized." Did the older computer simply download a lot more photos than the newer one?

 

[macman4789]

As it turns out, I have another computer (that I recently purchased) that syncs with the same iCloud account. Photos only take up 28GB. It is also set to "optimized." Did the older computer simply download a lot more photos than the newer one?

Yeah I think if, for example, you reformatted and installed a fresh version of MacOS and had optimise photo storage on it would most likely have a much lower amount stored locally. You may have downloaded/accessed the full res versions of a lot of the content (200GB+) over a period of time and that is why they are locally on your drive?

 

[Larsvonhier]

I have about 50,000 photos and 3200 videos in my iCloud account. It ends up occupying about 260-280GB on my MacBook Pro, even with the optimize setting in Photos.

Does that sound right? I’d like to further optimize it if possible. I’m not sure I need to be walking around with 260-280GB of photos!

Try the "Optimage" application, it can be set to either (visibly) lossless compression or slight loss of quality. Does real miracles in terms of quality vs. size (for photos and videos and even PDFs). The App can be tried for free with up to 24 files per day and only costs around 10$ for full usage (one time buy, no additional subscription or such crap).
Nice thing is, you can drag&drop whole folders and let it do batch runs.

 

[maxoakland]

Yeah I think if, for example, you reformatted and installed a fresh version of MacOS and had optimise photo storage on it would most likely have a much lower amount stored locally. You may have downloaded/accessed the full res versions of a lot of the content (200GB+) over a period of time and that is why they are locally on your drive?

But Optimize Photos is supposed to remove unused photos. At least that's how I would expect it to work. If it just keeps every photo you ever download around, it's just going to get more and more bloated

 

[jclin10]

But Optimize Photos is supposed to remove unused photos. At least that's how I would expect it to work. If it just keeps every photo you ever download around, it's just going to get more and more bloated

That would certainly make sense!

 

[ignatius345]

As it turns out, I have another computer (that I recently purchased) that syncs with the same iCloud account. Photos only take up 28GB. It is also set to "optimized." Did the older computer simply download a lot more photos than the newer one?

I think the local cache of images Photos has saved may have just grown. I think the rules for what gets purged are very much in keeping with other iCloud services (i.e. it does it itself when it decides it's necessary and you have no way to manually "evict" things that it's cached).

If you're 100% confident everything on that Mac is uploaded to iCloud, you could just delete the Photos library on that machine and let it start over. The cache would be much much smaller, at least to start with. A good way to verify what's uploaded is to go through the web interface at iCloud.com and see what you see there.

I would add something important here: make sure that somewhere you have everything backed up. If you own 50,000 photos you intend on keeping, and every Mac you use is set to Optimize, that means there are lots and lots of photos that are ONLY stored on Apple's servers. That's not great! If anything happened to their server or things got corrupted or whatever, your stuff is gone.

What I do is I have my iMac set with Optimize turned off, so that every photo and video in Photos is saved locally. Then I make sure that .photoslibrary file is backed up to another hard drive (two actually, with one being kept offsite). My laptop is set to Optimized, which is fine because the iMac is doing all the heavy lifting.

 

[jclin10]

Great advice about saving Photos locally on to a desktop. I went ahead and did that.

I was able to resolve the initial situation with an Apple technician on the phone. We basically toggled off the optimize function on my laptop and then turned it back on again. We had to do it a couple of times before it started, but after it did, we were able to get my laptop Photo file down to like 35GB, which seems much more reasonable.

I basically turned it off then turned it on again and it was resolved.

 

[jclin10]

I’d like to start moving photos from iCloud to Lightroom on an external hard drive

When I move/export the photos, how do I know that I am moving the full sized photo and not just the bookmark, particularly if I am doing it on a computer with iCloud Photos optimized?

 

[HDFan]

Back them up to a HD from the cloud for safety

make sure that somewhere you have everything backed up.

Since iCloud is not a backup service if you care about your photos you need to implement a 3-2-1 backup program. That generally means you need to have a copies of your photos on external disks.