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After upgrading to MacOS Catalina, the file size of my Mac Photos library remains unchanged no matter how many new photos and videos are being imported to the library. However, I do see more disc space being occupied in my external drive (My library is being kept in an external drive). How to solve such issue?
iMac, macOS 10.15
My photos library shows 145GB My disk with Cmd+I shows 146GB, as does Disk Utility. It's an external drive, spinning disk, formatted APFS. I have 36,000 photos and 102 videos
If you force Spotlight to reindex it may solve the reporting anomalies. It did for me. But they are pretty much irrelevant, I think
I wonder if it is an issue that requires a solution. You can often see weird disk size discrepancies between Finder, Disk Utility, Command+I, and they tend to even out over time.
Catalina appears to be optimised for SSD units, and presents anomalous disk utilisation reports to the end user. It prefers to sort out SSD volumes formatted with APFS in its own time, and we are intended to trust it. The user presentation is badly designed, and confuses expert and novice users alike. I suspect that set of anomalies exists on spinning disks too.
Th size shown in the Finder for my Photos Library is also a joke. There are 55000 photos and videos in the library, but the Finde is showing a size of 2.1GB. Inside the library package is an Originals folder of 180GB, and a Resources folder of 50GB. This pure magic.
After reinstalling the system the library size in the Finder increased from 2.1 to 5.5GB, and it is again stuck on the value. I am willing to trust Catalina and APFS, but we need to be able to see how much storage or media files are using, if we need to free storage.
kelvin_w wrote:
Thanks, luckily I can't identify any significant loss of photos so far, hopefully somehow the error can be fixed later on
I suspect your library is intact. What you are seeing is likely a Catalina peculiarity, perhaps not even an error. Please don't lose any sleep over it.
In About this Mac, Storage I see a library size of 1.56TB. My mac is currently syncing with the cloud, though. It's missing some photos and videos.
In Users-->Pictures-->Photos Library (my system Library) I see 3.04TB
The size of my iCloud library is 1.5TB, which I generally expect to be smaller than the originals stored on my Mac, by about 10% (compression, whatever else)
Thanks, luckily I can't identify any significant loss of photos so far, hopefully somehow the error can be fixed later on
Thanks but seems this doesn't work for me too, anyway I will plug it to another mac to try
Mac Photos library size
