Duplication of Photos in iCloud, Library & Photos Library
One of the issues that I've been trying to get to grips with is the problem of the Mobile Documents folder in my User Library containing all my Photos. These are already stored in my iCloud and therefore in the Photos Library inside the Pictures folder. At 230GB it's fairly substantial but when combined with the same, duplicate files inside the Mobile Documents folder it's using a whopping 460GB of my hard drive... I also have 200GB of Movie files and another 200GB of Music files so this means that 860GB of my 1TB is dedicated to just three folders - and I'm not even able to back-up my Movie & Music folders on iCloud because the duplication of these folders inside the Mobile Documents folder in my User Library would just lead to a veritable brick-wall situation.
When I try to run any intensive virtual software, which uses disk space as virtual memory, i.e. Final Cut Pro or Photoshop or Pro Tools and my poor wee MacBook Pro just sighs and goes on strike.
How on earth can I distribute my files and folders and get back to an onboard hard drive which will run these apps efficiently - especially as this generation of MBPs won't allow the user to increase the capacity of the onboard hard drive?
I've been using Apple Macs exclusively since 1983, so I've learnt to cope with many, many changes over the years but this current system set-up is just frustration personified...
HELP!
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 12.6