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Photos / Free Up Space

I need to free up space on my laptop. I have paid for the iCloud Service and synced the photos. Is it possible to get them off the hard drive. I have 300gb of them. I have set-up the optimize storage in the preferences but they are still on my machine.

iMac 27″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jul 20, 2020 12:00 PM

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Posted on Jul 20, 2020 1:32 PM

Neil_Rodman wrote:

I need to free up space on my laptop. I have paid for the iCloud Service and synced the photos. Is it possible to get them off the hard drive. I have 300gb of them. I have set-up the optimize storage in the preferences but they are still on my machine.

iCloud is a syncing service, not a storage service. If you delete something off of your computer, it will also be deleted from iCloud. I'd suggest buying an external hard drive for storing all those photos.

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Jul 20, 2020 1:32 PM in response to Neil_Rodman

Neil_Rodman wrote:

I need to free up space on my laptop. I have paid for the iCloud Service and synced the photos. Is it possible to get them off the hard drive. I have 300gb of them. I have set-up the optimize storage in the preferences but they are still on my machine.

iCloud is a syncing service, not a storage service. If you delete something off of your computer, it will also be deleted from iCloud. I'd suggest buying an external hard drive for storing all those photos.

Jul 20, 2020 1:14 PM in response to Neil_Rodman

As far as I am aware, you can't delete them from your Mac as that will remove them from iCloud too.


If optimise storage is on and isn't doing the job well enough, you can look at something like DropBox as this has an option to remove from the Mac which leaving the files on DropBox.


I'm not sure whether it will work with Apple's Photos application, though.

Jul 21, 2020 1:35 AM in response to Neil_Rodman

Photos will not start removing or 'optimising' space until you start to run out of hard disk storage.


The best way to achieve what you want is to create a new library and then use that as the primary library. Photos will then create thumbnails for every photo and only download the original if you edit the photo or wish to export it - the size of this library will then only be a couple of GB.


However, as someone mentioned, you should make sure you have an additional copy of your photos stored safely. If you only have a single version of the original stored in iCloud then you do not have a backup.

Photos / Free Up Space

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