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Hard Drive fills back up with photos despite moving Photos Library to external drive

I followed this guide and moved my Photos Library to an External Drive, deleting the original Photos Library from the Macintosh HD. I gained 40GB of space and the Macintosh HD showed 102GB free space in total. Then over the next 10mins the 'Manage Storage' screen showed the Mac filling up with 'Photos' (I wasn't doing anything) - first 7GB of photos, then 18GB, then 32GB, finally 37GB. At the same time the Machintosh HD returned to 65GB free instead of the 102GB free it had a few minutes earlier.


There is no Photos Library on the Macintosh HD that I can find - only the System one on the External Drive. A similar question was asked previously on this article but because the user wanted to upgrade the operating system, the help offered was focussed on finding space. The main use of space in my situation, aside from 'other users' (54GB) is the photos on my account (40GB). How do I find those photos to remove them? Again, when I deleted the old Photos Library, the 'photos' listing on the Manage Storage screen went from 40GB to less than 1GB. Then it refilled to basically the same level. Why?

iMac 21.5″, macOS 11.3

Posted on May 21, 2021 7:15 AM

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2 replies

May 21, 2021 7:40 AM in response to gwilymhardy

Do you use time machine for backups?


If so is your backup drive connected. If it isn't, time machine will create a snapshot on your system drive to protect your files. So even though you have deleted the library, it is still stored in the snapshot taking up space.


If this is the case, make sure your backup drive is connected, and allow it to complete a day or two of backups.

May 21, 2021 7:50 AM in response to TonyCollinet

Hi, thanks for jumping in so quickly! As far as I can see, Time machine isn't active - we knew we had very little space (250GB total) on this iMac, and most of everything is on iCloud and Google, so we never set it up.


With that being the case, is there any other backup that might be taking up that space as 'Photos'? Or any other ideas for what might be happening?

Hard Drive fills back up with photos despite moving Photos Library to external drive

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