imac moved photo library space not released

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Level 1

8 points

imac moved photo library space not released

Quite a while ago I moved all my iPhoto libraries from my SSD to HD2 to save space. Everything seemed to go OK and I eventually moved all the libraries to Photos. I am now getting disk space warnings on HD 1 and info shows 249 GB of 250 GB used.

I use finder and I don't see any big files and no libraries. So I use 'About this Mac' and I select storage I see graphically that a huge amount of space is dedicated to Photos. Clicking 'Manage' I see that there is 126.03 GB of storage used by Photos. However using Finder I can't see any libraries.

Clicking on the list of recommendations for managing the 'Photo's' the only option is move to iCloud.

Question: how do I remove or reclaim this space?

Posted on Mar 23, 2019 1:17 PM

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Answer 1

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BDAqua

Level 10

239,405 points

Mar 23, 2019 2:19 PM in response to JackDob

Yikes, that is dangerously low!

Have you emptied the Trash recently?

Are you getting these???

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015

Find Any File...

http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.php

Hold Option or alt key when selecting Find to Find All.

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Answer 2

JackDob Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 24, 2019 8:02 AM in response to BDAqua

First of all, thanks for the reply..

I have emptied the trash once my Time Machine started complaining about space. Unfortunately that cured my issues for a while. I did not investigate why my SSD was so full. I installed some tax software which brought this all to light. The FindAnyFile software sounds like exactly what I need. I am assuming that when I moved the libraries there was an incomplete process that left the space allocated.

This is what I see

When I click manage I see this.. There is 210 GB shown off my home directory but expanding all the twists yields no large files.. Since the FindAnyFile software doesn't use existing indexing this should give me the location of the file or file structure that is causing my issues.

I

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Answer 3

JackDob Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 25, 2019 4:00 PM in response to BDAqua

Well FAF did its job and was worth the $7.99 fee.

What I found was a email IMAP file that was 130GB according to FAF. This text file was logging all my emails since Feb 15th 2018. I looked through all my settings and I cannot figure out why this file got out of control. I was not able to open the file with a text editor because to the critical available disk space but FAF would allow me to peek at the file and that is how I know when it started or some time after that failed to trim. FAF could not delete it but allowed a 'move to trash'. where I could empty the trash. My eMail is functioning at this time and doesn't appear to be rebuilding the IMAP file. I will monitor disk space going forward. When I was able to delete the file I received 60GB according to Disk Info, but but was more like 118GB after a reboot.

There is also an interesting bit of info that the manage disk UI is showing incorrect information. I have added some screen shots that shows the incorrect indication. I do have jpegs in the home picture directory and probably at or near 1GB but nowhere near what is indicated by the GUI. FAF said there was only 1 file that was over 1GB in size and that appears to me as a indexed file. The offending file and the indexing file were hidden.

Maybe the GUI sells iCloud space but this is very misleading, to say the least. This is what I see now.. FWIW

Thanks for your help!