Philbee

Q: Photos disk space usage

I don't quite understand what Photos does: it uses 3 times as much disk space as Aperture for the same library.

 

My Aperture library with some 53k photos (~200GB on external SSD) and a few hundred videos (~100GB on external SSD) uses around 40GB disk space for thumbnails in various sizes, database and so on.

 

After a few hours of importing, the same library in Photos has grown to 119.9GB.

Settings are: do not copy images to library, no use of iCloud Photo Library (and thus no "optimize Mac space usage").

Inside the library file, the Thumbnails directory uses a sane-looking 16.66GB, Previews is 7.29GB, and Masters uses only 1.35GB, since almost all images are still stored in Aperture referenced masters on external SSD.

 

The largest directory inside the library is Resources > model resources, with a whopping 86GB for 147k objects (images).

I'm almost sure these are a result of my trying and then disabling iCloud Photo Library during import yesterday afternoon.

Since Photos does not delete those resources for some reason (disk space and RAM are always cheap and plentiful for Apple, I guess) – is there a way for me to get rid of it if I don't want iCloud Photo Library? Would Photos be smart enough to start culling images here when my system disk space, a paltry 256GB SSD, dwindles towards zero?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2013), iOS 7.0.4

Posted on Apr 10, 2015 10:56 PM

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Q: Photos disk space usage

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  • by Hokusai,

    Hokusai Hokusai Apr 11, 2015 2:33 AM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 2:33 AM in response to Philbee

    I don't know about iCloud but it seems that this big model resources folder is linked with face recognition, it contains close up thumbnails of faces.

    Mine is 25GB, very annoying as you can't change any settings in the automated face scanning of your library or easily get rid of those hundreds of useless and unknown faces from events, concerts, school pictures...

  • by Philbee,

    Philbee Philbee Apr 11, 2015 2:54 AM in response to Hokusai
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 2:54 AM in response to Hokusai

    Looks like you might be right about this, at least partly – I had lots of files with no faces anywhere in them.

     

    I deleted all files from there. Photos still works, but now starts putting files back in, while face recognition view adds portraits.

  • by mikeindc,

    mikeindc mikeindc Apr 11, 2015 5:38 AM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (15 points)
    iTunes
    Apr 11, 2015 5:38 AM in response to Philbee

    I did the beta test of Yosemite with it and found that the Photo library was about 50% bigger than the iPhoto library.

  • by Philbee,

    Philbee Philbee Apr 11, 2015 11:24 AM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 11:24 AM in response to Philbee

    Looks like Hokusai was spot-on: Photos gobbles up gigabytes of disk space like there's no tomorrow mostly for the purpose of creating cropped copies of photos that have a face in it. Why Aperture was able to show faces without such crude measures, we'll never know; but I'm sure higher-ups at Apple are already looking forward to the extra $$$ by forced ultra-expensive SSD upsales (and Cloud space twice as expensive as DropBox).

     

    I killed Photos.app while it was steadily working towards leaving me with an almost-unusable computer by using all available disk space, leaving only a few megabytes free, for the second time around. The photos library is being deleted as I write.

  • by Mr. Apple101,

    Mr. Apple101 Mr. Apple101 Apr 11, 2015 11:34 AM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (134 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 11:34 AM in response to Philbee

    Hey Philbee,

     

    This may provide some of the answers you're looking for.

     

    Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries - Apple Support

  • by GadjetX,

    GadjetX GadjetX Apr 11, 2015 12:16 PM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 12:16 PM in response to Philbee

    I also have about 90gb of photo files in an external disc and as iPhoto only used about 12gb of library space the Photos app uses around 65gb!

    Any idea on what to do? I have a 256gb ssd and don't want to fill it up with copies of photos I have stored on an external 2tb disc.

  • by Philbee,

    Philbee Philbee Apr 11, 2015 12:29 PM in response to Mr. Apple101
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 12:29 PM in response to Mr. Apple101

    Thanks for pointing that out, Mr. Apple.

    Unfortunately, this does not make a difference, since my master images are already shared between Aperture and Photo: they're on an external SSD, not managed by Aperture.

     

    I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. I expected to finally get the light-weight and fast application for the modern SSD age. Right now it seems old Aperture can do much more, uses much less resources to do so, and is faster as well (scaling thumbnails is everything but smooth on my gen-1 MacBook Pro Retina).

  • by Philbee,

    Philbee Philbee Apr 11, 2015 12:30 PM in response to GadjetX
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 12:30 PM in response to GadjetX

    Presently, I have no other solution than to not use Photos.

  • by graigsmith,

    graigsmith graigsmith Apr 11, 2015 12:33 PM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (35 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 12:33 PM in response to Philbee

    it could be because the side bar images are square, maybe it caches the square cropped images.  Theres a setting to not crop the thumbnails on the sidebar.

     

    wonder if that does anything.

     

    i have noticed that it's way faster now than in beta.   The cache probably helps speed it up a lot.

  • by Philbee,

    Philbee Philbee Apr 11, 2015 12:42 PM in response to graigsmith
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 12:42 PM in response to graigsmith

    graigsmith wrote:

     

    it could be because the side bar images are square, maybe it caches the square cropped images.  Theres a setting to not crop the thumbnails on the sidebar.

     

    wonder if that does anything.

     

    i have noticed that it's way faster now than in beta.   The cache probably helps speed it up a lot.

    I'm sure that speed is the reason they went with this heavy-handed way of handling faces. This will help a lot when people start having their masters library in the cloud.

    However, when Photos simply fills up my system SSD to the point of OSX complaining that it can't work reliably anymore for lack of space, as it did on the first Aperture library import here and was about to do again hours ago, this really is besides the point somewhat.

  • by Mr. Apple101,

    Mr. Apple101 Mr. Apple101 Apr 11, 2015 3:48 PM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (134 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 3:48 PM in response to Philbee

    Sorry, I had not read the entire post. But you both have provided some very interesting details that will hopefully help others with their Photos issues. Personally I still prefer using Aperture as well.

  • by MacRainer,

    MacRainer MacRainer Apr 12, 2015 3:48 AM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 12, 2015 3:48 AM in response to Philbee

    Hi Philbee,

    same problem here: I used Aperture with 'referenced' masters on my NAS (QNAP). My Aperture library was on the iMac's internal SSD. I migrated the library to Photos and now the situation is as follows:

     

    • Masters ~ 95 GB (for both, Aperture and Photos). On my NAS.
    • Aperture library was about 23 GB which seems reasonable since it did not contain the masters.
    • Photos library is 55 GB (!!!) despite I did select 'do not copy files into library' in Preferences
    • Inside the HUGE Photos library (package), the by-far largest folder is 'resources' with about 40 GB (!!!). If I did deeper, I find a lot of original photos and videos inside the subfolder 'model resources' (inside 'resources'). Why the **** are they here?

     

    Otherwise I could imagine to use Photos but I hope Apple will fix this waste-of-SSD-space!

  • by iScottMac,

    iScottMac iScottMac May 8, 2015 4:46 PM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 8, 2015 4:46 PM in response to Philbee

    What if you deleted the 'masters' off your hard drive once they have been uploaded into the cloud? Anyone know?

    Right now my library is taking up 130GB of valuable space on my hard drive...which I need back.

    The whole point in moving everything to the cloud was to free up space (especially considering the tiny SSD drives included on most modern Macs). 

    You would think the obvious answer would be to include a user setting that says 'reduce internal library to XXGB' once files are in the cloud.

  • by giopiar84,

    giopiar84 giopiar84 May 11, 2015 9:07 AM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 11, 2015 9:07 AM in response to Philbee

    It's a bug there from the fist beta. I'm using 10.10.3 since public beta 1 and the problem is present in every revision. I've sent a feedback but had no answer at all.

    If you disable copying images to library, Photos creates a copy of every single pic and put it in model resource folder (...sometime this copy is even bigger than the original one). Only way to stop this behavior and save space is to let Photos copy pics into library. In this way moderesouce folder is only a few Mbs.

     

    Unfortunately it seems that Apple doesn't care...

     

    Regards,

    Giorgio

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