Photos optimization

[Ori Dekel]

Hello,
I bought a MacBook Pro, I set everything up.
In the photos setting I marked optimize storage.
For some reason the storage capacity of the photos is the same as the volume in iCloud.

On the iPhone it works great.

Anyone know what the reason is?

Thanks,
Ori

 

[Wando64]

Probably just me, but I don’t quite understand what you mean by “the storage capacity of the photos is the same as the volume in iCloud”.

With optimise storage switched on, nothing much changes as long as you have sufficient storage available on your mac.
If/when you run low on local storage, MacOS (or iOS) will keep low quality versions of some your photos (and videos) locally and download the Hi-Res versions from iCloud only when needed.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I have 85.1GB of photos. With optimized storage turned on, each of my devices usually downloads around 10-15GB of photos and keeps it around there.

My guess is, your photo library is <20GB? Like Wando64 said, if you have space, it'll utilize it especially if the library itself is small.

 

[Ori Dekel]

So why on my iPhone, with a lot of free space, the local photos storage is about 10 percent and not on my Mac?

 

[BigMcGuire]

So why on my iPhone, with a lot of free space, the local photos storage is about 10 percent and not on my Mac?

Did you already download the entire library to your Mac? What you're explaining happened to me when I already had all my photos on my Mac then turned on optimize storage (just kept everything there).

 

[Wando64]

So why on my iPhone, with a lot of free space, the local photos storage is about 10 percent and not on my Mac?

My impression is that it is more aggressive in its optimisation on iOS.
But then, I would guess that probably, in absolute terms, the available storage on the phone is much less than the available storage on the Mac.
As you could require GBs on one single new video, it makes sense to keep a reasonable amount of free space.