Photos Compression

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Level 1

8 points

Photos Compression

Hi. For over twelve years I've collected photos but never imported them into iPhotos or Photos, just kept them on an external Drobo. Now that my old Mac Pro has been obsoleted to El Capitan I bought a new MacBookPro running Catalina. I also have an external SSD that I can keep the entire photo collection on, all imported into the Photos library. However I am a bit confused.

On the Drobo Finder on my old Mac Pro says that my photos folder is about 499GB in size. If I import all those into Photos on the new MacbookPro, finder only says the library file size is about 108GB. In addition, if I spotlight search on "Photos Library" and find the new library on the external SSDd it calculates the size of the library file as 179GB! So, I really want to know if the import process is missing a lot of large videos I've got or if things are somehow compressed taking up less space. A drop from 500GB to 100GB seems like a lot of compressions.

Also, while importing files I watched the finder reported size of the library as hours went by importing files and it never moved in spite of many gB of video in process of being imported.

Anybody got a reason? I don't want to spend more days doing this until I really understand whats going on...

Thanks

MacBook Pro, OS X 10.11

Posted on Jun 30, 2020 9:25 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

borgheart Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 2, 2020 2:53 PM in response to Yer_Man

Thanks very much for replying. I think where the problem of losing files was that the Consolidate command I used at first on my initial attempt to import files to an existing library just didn't work or couldn't find the files to import them. In addition, Finder much have cached the SIZE of the library file somewhere and it just never updated it in a finder window. If I inspected the contents of the library the "originals" folder clearly had 200 gb more files than the finder reported.

Anyway, as you suggested I started with a fresh library and started importing the files. Everything worked just perfectly in all regards as the 500gB were added. I did it in small batches at first and it all added up.

Anyway, thanks....pushed me in the right direction.....

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Answer 2

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,320 points

Jun 30, 2020 10:41 AM in response to borgheart

When you import anything to Photos a byte by byte copy of the item is made. There is no compression added to anything on import.

Not every video format or codec is supported, so it's quite possible that some videos were not imported.

How to go forward from here? Frankly I'd start over and import in batches, then compare the import with what is in your folder system after each import. Slower, yes, but definitely more secure.

Also, if you're putting that library on an external then the disk must be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or apfs.

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Photos Compression

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