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