How much space are my pictures/videos really taking up?

When I click on the Apple icon at the top left of my screen and go to About This Mac---Storage---Manage, it says that Photos for Mac is using 468.59GB.


When I open finder and go to User---Pictures---Get Info, it says 685.74GB. Inside this folder I have two libraries.

iPhoto Library takes up 336.81GB.

Photos Library 372.38GB.

Just those two combined equals 709.19GB which is more than what get info says for the entire folder they are contained in. When Photos for Mac came out I switched to that from iPhoto and have never looked back.

So how much space are all the pictures/videos really taking up and why are the numbers so different?

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.14

Posted on Mar 9, 2019 11:34 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 10, 2019 12:20 AM

Your photos are taking up the the amount of storage for the Photos Library (372.38GB) plus the amount of storage for the thumbnails and other working copies in the iPhoto Library.

Most of the storage for the original image files and some of the edited versions will be shared by your iPhoto Library and the Photos Library. when you migrated the iPhoto Library to Photos the new original image files have been created as hard links to the original image files in the photos Library. This way, the new files are sharing the storage with the items in the iPhoto Library.

I would move the iPhoto Library to an external drive to keep it as a backup, if you do no longer use it. Then you will be able to see the actual size of the items in your Pictures folder. The Finder cannot do the arithmetic for hard links correctly, because they are independent files, very different from aliases.


The shared storage is explained here:


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3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 10, 2019 12:20 AM in response to mnbinth

Your photos are taking up the the amount of storage for the Photos Library (372.38GB) plus the amount of storage for the thumbnails and other working copies in the iPhoto Library.

Most of the storage for the original image files and some of the edited versions will be shared by your iPhoto Library and the Photos Library. when you migrated the iPhoto Library to Photos the new original image files have been created as hard links to the original image files in the photos Library. This way, the new files are sharing the storage with the items in the iPhoto Library.

I would move the iPhoto Library to an external drive to keep it as a backup, if you do no longer use it. Then you will be able to see the actual size of the items in your Pictures folder. The Finder cannot do the arithmetic for hard links correctly, because they are independent files, very different from aliases.


The shared storage is explained here:


Mar 11, 2019 12:23 AM in response to léonie

I'm still struggling to understand what is in the iPhoto Library. If I move only the iPhoto library to an external drive, what exactly is being moved? Is there really 336.81GB of space to be moved?


I will never use the iPhoto app again. The last time I opened it was April 2015. However, I need the content that I once viewed and organized in the app. When I installed Photos, it imported everything from iPhoto (at least visually to me). If I delete the iPhoto Library today, am I removing all of that content that was moved over to Photos from iPhoto? In other words, will all the old iPhoto content I brought over disappear from what I can see in the Photos app?


Unrelated question. Does Photos for Mac make a new file every time I make an edit? So if I import a file and crop it, are there now two files?

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How much space are my pictures/videos really taking up?

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