I don't want "Photos" on my iMac

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Level 1

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I don't want "Photos" on my iMac

I have a brand new iMac that I've been really happy with until today when I kept getting the message that the system storage was to full to be running applications and I realised that Photos was using up 103GB! I went to my iCloud settings and turned off Photos under "Apps on this Mac using iCloud". But the photos are all still there. I don't want them stored on my mac. Most of them are stored on iCloud in my iPhone and I want them on my iPhone only. I find the Photos app on Mac to be horrible and have never had the need to grab photos from there. I usually just use airdrop. I'm afraid of deleting the photos in the Photos app because I don't want them gone, just not stored here. I wish I could just delete the photos app, can anybody help me to free up these 100GB of photos with out deleting them completely and still having them accessible on my iphone? Thanks.

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 28, 2020 11:03 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

200,633 points

Aug 28, 2020 11:35 AM in response to volundur

To avoid the iCloud Photos on your Mac open the Photos.app, then make sure the Photos > Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Photos is disabled.

Then quit Photos and delete the item "Photos Library.photoslibrary" from your Pictures folder and empty the Trash. Or move the Photos Library.photoslibrary to an external volume to have a backup of your photos.

You cannot delete the Photos.app itself. It is a part of the system, like Mail and Contacts and protected by the System Integrity Protection. But the size of the Photos.app is very small, just 46.1 MB, less than a RAW file.

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I don't want "Photos" on my iMac

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