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So photos are taking up an insane amount of space on my mac. How do I delete them locally and ONLY locally? Ie I want them to remain on my other devices (iphone) and in iCloud?
MacBook Pro 13”, macOS 10.15
If you unchecked "System preferences > AppleID > iCloud > Photos" and checked, that Photos > Preferences > iCloud has been turned off as well, you can simply delete your current Photos Library completely.
By default, the Photos Library will be in the Pictures folder in your user Home folder.
~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary
The icon looks like this:
Either delete the Photos Library completely, or open the Photos.app on your Mac and delete all photos you are seeing there. But if you delete photos using the Photos.app, you have to be really sure, that iCloud Photos has been disabled.
If you unchecked "System preferences > AppleID > iCloud > Photos" and checked, that Photos > Preferences > iCloud has been turned off as well, you can simply delete your current Photos Library completely.
By default, the Photos Library will be in the Pictures folder in your user Home folder.
~/Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary
The icon looks like this:
Either delete the Photos Library completely, or open the Photos.app on your Mac and delete all photos you are seeing there. But if you delete photos using the Photos.app, you have to be really sure, that iCloud Photos has been disabled.
Do you want to delete all photos, or selected Photos?
If you want to remove the local copies, but still have access to the iCloud Photos Library, use "Optimize Mac Storage". This can reduce the size of the local library down to roughly 10% to 20% of the size used in iCloud.
The size will slowly get smaller, not immediately. To force an instant optimisation, you could try this procedure: How to force Photos for Mac to Optimise t… - Apple Community
But you must not delete any photos from your Mac, while the Photos Library is syncing with iCloud. The deleted photo or video will be deleted from iCloud as well and all other synced devices. iCloud Photos is not an independent external storage. The purpose is to keep the photo libraries in sync and identical on all devices. The local libraries on your devices mirror the iCloud Photos Library.
I want to delete all - but only locally. So I want to turn off sync completely.
I went to Settings>Apple ID and unchecked "photos". My question now is: where to find all the local photos to delete and I'M ASSUMING if I do that it won't affect the cloud. Is that correct?
How do I delete photos on Mac locally, but NOT in the cloud?
