Photos taking up the most storage with 13k photos/videos. I have selected Optomize Mac Storage but nothing seems to be happening. On iCloud drive there are only 7k photos at the moment. I'm constantly getting the message that the disk is almost full. Will the photo optimization not occur until it's full? If so, can I turn off that message? Thanks
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13
Ldubs wrote:
Will the photo optimization not occur until it's full?
To your original question, the "Optimizing Storage" doesn't happen until it's necessary. Photos will keep full sized images on your Mac until the free space gets low. That's pretty clever, really, because it makes editing and some other operations faster. As storage space gets thin, Photos will begin to keep only screen-sized versions of images as needed.
How much space does your Library take up? You can look in the Pictures folder to see. And how much space do you have left on your internal drive? There has to be enough "turn around room" for Photos to complete its operations.
You have an external backup, and that's good. But if space is really at a premium, you can move your Library to an external drive-- but it shouldn't be the same one as your backup. There's information about using a Library on an external drive here:
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
Let us know how it goes....
No, you can't turn off that message. It serves a serious purpose. If your HD gets too full your Mac wills top functioning and that is a real problem. Your solution is to purchase an external disk which you can then copy files onto. Then they can be deleted from your HD to clear needed space. External disks are now reasonably priced with many to choose from. They are easily installed with vendor provided USB cables. You may have to first reformat it, though. Then, problem solved.
Thanks but I have an external hat drive backup. My question is really related to optimizing space using iCloud. I’ve turned it on but my photos are not uploading to the cloud as I have 13k photos on my computer and only 7k on iCloud Photos. Not sure if the rest won’t upload to iCloud until I run out of space?
I am not an iCloud expert but I can tell you this. iCloud is NOT a Mac backup function. It is for iPhones and iPads. It is primarily designed to be used as a cross platform sharing function. If you rely on it for backup, at some time you will loose important data. You say that you "have an external hat drive backup". What does that mean. Reliable backups are only done to external dedicated backup disks or to cloud services which are dedicated to that service. My advice concerning your solution still stands. I hope you will follow it.
Thanks for your helpful response. My photo library takes up 65gb and I have 2gb remaining on my internal drive.
Disk is almost full message constantly appearing. Help with Photos.
