Cleaning Up My Photos Collection

Question

Cleaning Up My Photos Collection

I'm currently using Photos for all my photos stored on my Mac. As my library grows, it's become a problem on my 1TB internal drive on my MacBook, and having the entire library in iCloud is compounding the problem across multiple devices.

I want to use my iCloud account to maintain the last two years of photos online and accessible across all my devices, but anything older than this, I want to move onto an external drive. (Basically I want to archive my older photos for offline storage) and then, every January, archive the photos from the second oldest year), so I'm only ever maintaining 1-2 years worth of photos synced across devices on iCloud.

My concern is that I have two MacBooks. On my 17" older MacBook, my Photos library is 327.6GB

My 15" newer MacBook's Photos library is 434.93GB. This size difference is concerning to me.

I also have some photos in an old iPhoto library, which I had originally migrated to my Photos library when it was first released, but I never deleted it, as I got some cryptic messages about not all photos were migrated at the time for some reason (I can't remember the exact message now). I didn't want to delete it as I don't really want to loose any photos.

Can anyone give me a suggestion as to how I can accomplish this using Photos, or another program?

I've been thinking about creating a new library, dumping the contents of all photos into this as a Master library, then using some kind of deduplication software to detect and remove any duplicates if necessary. I'd rather deal with some duplication than loose any photos. But I'd really like to get this growing mess of photos cleaned up.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

cwokral's 17" MacBook Pro

Posted on Sep 18, 2020 4:21 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,828 points

Sep 20, 2020 6:26 AM in response to PhotosLibrary

Just a few ideas.

You don't have to keep full size copies on any of your Macs. There is still a limit to storing all of the "optimized" thumbnails. This may be why one library is larger than the other. Check in Photos Preferences, iCloud to see if one is set to keep full copies and the other is set to Optimize storage.

You can move your Photos Library to an external drive. That doesn't alter the total storage in iCloud Photos, but allows you to free up space on the internal drive. You'd just copy the .photoslibrary to an external, then open that Library by holding down Option key when starting Photos. Once open, set it as the System Library in preferences. You can then delete the library on the internal drive.

You can export (then delete) photos from your Library, then import those into another Library (on an external disk). You can switch Libraries when you start up Photos as noted above. The problem with exporting the photos is any keywords and other metadata you created in Photos is lost. I don't think there is a way to transfer from one Library to another. The only advantage I see to importing them into another Library would be if you could keep all of the metadata you created, so maybe just storing them in folders in Finder would be sufficient. Or, put in the effort to recreate any keywords and other metadata on the new Library.

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Answer 2

Sep 25, 2020 2:49 AM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks for taking the time to respond to me and your ideas. Also, thanks for the pointer on why the libraries may be of different sizes.

I don't seem to really use Photos to do any image adjustment or tagging, so maybe I should be considering another program.

One of my other goals to this whole process is to reduce the amount of storage space that I'm using in iCloud, and so I'd like to download the full size images from the cloud, and delete them from syncing across devices.

If you have any suggestions on a program that might better help me managing my overflowing library of photos, please let me know.

Thanks again Barney.

Chris

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,828 points

Sep 25, 2020 3:58 AM in response to PhotosLibrary

I've never used anything else.

You could just create folders in Finder on an external drive.

You can use Image Capture to import the files from your camera/phone into those folders.

If you are not going to use any of the other features, there is no point in the overhead of management program.

If you need to do any photo manipulation, you could purchase a program like Pixelmator or Affinity Photo. They are both small, one-time purchases.

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Answer 4

Sep 25, 2020 6:40 AM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks Barney, I've basically been using it as an easy way to view photos, with the occasional cropping or some minor changes, but maybe you're right. Perhaps the best solution is to just export everything, and organize them into years on an external hard drive, once a year export the images to a new folder structure.

I liked being able to easily navigate my image library, and using the search functionality for places, people and things. While an archive function would be really desirable to me, perhaps this is't something others are really looking for.

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Cleaning Up My Photos Collection

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