Photos library

Question

Photos library

Hi friends!

I have only one Photos library on my Macbook and I don't sync it with iCloud.

I imported in Photos library all my digital photos I did since 2008 and now my library has about 50K items (324 GB)

I'm cleanig my library and I removed a lot of duplicates and I'll keep on removing everything I can, saving only the best and most important photos.

Nevertheless I'm sure I'll still have a big library. But this is not the point.

The point is that everyday I remove hundred of photos (that is thousands of MB a day) but my work of "eraser" doesn't reduce the size of my library.

Of course after deleting photos I remove them without waiting the usual 29 days that Photos leaves to our Mac users to "repent" because I'm sure to get rid of them at once.

However the library is slightly smaller after days of my deleting but it is not as smaller as it should after removing Giga of photos.

Can you help me to understand why this happens.

(I need to have a smaller library to work better with Photos and to save space on my internal HDD ...luckily it is an SSD drive!)

TIA

Alberto

MacBook Pro 15" mid 2014 - 2,8 GHz Intel Core i7 quad-core - RAM 16 GB

MacOS 10.15.7 - Macuser since 1984

Photos Version 5.0 (161.0.120)

MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Jul 9, 2022 7:53 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

197,171 points

Jul 9, 2022 11:06 AM in response to Alberto Ferrari1

Did you previously use iPhoto or Aperture, and did you migrate an iPhoto Library to Photos? Then you have to remove the old iPhoto Library or Aperture library from the drive, where you are keeping the new Photos Library, or no storage will be freed.

You may want to wait a few days to see the effect of your cleaning up the library. The Finder is a bit slow to update the size of the library that is shown in the Finder. What does the modification date for the Photos Library show? You cannot trust the size shown in the Finder, if the modification date has not been updated in a long time.

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Answer 2

Jul 9, 2022 2:45 PM in response to léonie

Thank you for your reply.

I don't have neither iPhoto nor Aperture libraries, anyway thanks for your reminder.

On the other hand I didn't remember how lazy is the Finder in updating files and folders size! So, you are right! Actually Photos library date in Finder window never changed since one month ago and that's why I cannot (still) observe the effectiveness of my cleaning work.

It'a pity but that's it.

The Finder was always slow in updating files/folders/etc size , but I think that it has been getting worse after introducing Mac OS X. It' annoying, but I'll cope with it! 😉

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Photos library

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