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My Photos section of my MacBook is taking up a lot of memory. What do you recommend?

When I check the storage section of my MacBook, I see that Photos is taking up over 70 GB of my storage. I have checked the "Recommendations" and asked for it to "Store in Cloud" but apparently my iCloud Photo Library is already turned on. I'm not really sure what to do now. Surely there is a better place for my Photos to be stored than on my laptop's memory?


MacBook Pro 13″, OS X 10.10

Posted on Jul 11, 2021 7:17 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 11, 2021 7:38 AM

You have two choices.


1 - move your library to external storage. This is not so convenient though, because it should be connected to your mac whenever you are logged in.


2 - better for a laptop might be to set “optimise mac storage”. This will keep full size originals only in iCloud, leaving thumbnails and small previews on your mac. It dramatically reduces the storage needed on your mac for your library, while making Photos behave as though you have everything locally. The only downside is there will be a short delay if you do an operation which needs the full size original (Eg edit or export), while it is downloaded from iCloud

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jul 11, 2021 7:38 AM in response to mcncheese

You have two choices.


1 - move your library to external storage. This is not so convenient though, because it should be connected to your mac whenever you are logged in.


2 - better for a laptop might be to set “optimise mac storage”. This will keep full size originals only in iCloud, leaving thumbnails and small previews on your mac. It dramatically reduces the storage needed on your mac for your library, while making Photos behave as though you have everything locally. The only downside is there will be a short delay if you do an operation which needs the full size original (Eg edit or export), while it is downloaded from iCloud

My Photos section of my MacBook is taking up a lot of memory. What do you recommend?

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