Reduce Size of Photos App before I turn on iCloud

[flywest615]

I have googled reduce iPhoto app size and have read many different ways on how to accomplish this but none seem very good. Can someone please give me a way to significantly reduce the size of my Photos app?

I have 20,000 photos that take up more than 240gb's. I don't think I take a lot of photos and many are from an iPhone and maybe a digital SLR( some even in RAW). I feel I have an average number of photos but yet 240gb's is way too many to carry around. I am looking to get a new Macbook and feel cornered into the 512GB realm or maybe even future myself with a 1tb Macbook but that is a lot of money. I also will never carry around an external HD because that defeats portability. So in the end my goal right now is to get my library down below the 200gb level and that will also save me a lot of money when I turn on the new iCloud backup in Photos.

Can someone share a helpful way of reducing my Photos library size? I am ok with deleting the originals for any photo that I have edited.

 

[MCAsan]

I have GBs of raw images in my LR catalog and don't carry any of them around. I read my cards, decide on the keepers and import them into LR on my internal SSD. After those images are edited I use LR Library to move the folders from the SSD to the my external library RAID set. That frees up space on my SSD for the next photo shoot. Images I want to share would be made part of a collection. I export a collection as jpg from LR into a dedicated folder. I then tell iTues to synch the folders to my iPad (or iPhone). I find this to be a simple workflow that is quick and does not eat up scarce storage space on the SSD.