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I can no longer see updated photos from my phone on my Mac. The storage on my MacBook Air is full (mostly with photos). I have iCloud Photos enabled and space optimization toggled on. How do I get these off my MacBook without deleting them from iCloud?
Also, this is a new MacBook Air that has never been enabled to store photos. Not sure if that is helpful info or not.
MacBook Air 15″, macOS 13.5
Have you enabled "Optimise Mac Storage" in both places? There are two settings for this:
Turn it on in both places, if you only enabled one of them.
How large is your Photos Library in iCloud? Even with Optimize Mac Storage enabled the optimized versions stored locally on your Mac will need local storage on your Mac, as Ralph explained. As an estimate - they may take up to 10% to 20% of the storage used in iCloud. This will depend on format of your original image files. I would not let the iCloud Photos Library get larger in iCloud than five times the size of the storage you can afford for your photos on your device with the least storage. For example, if you do not want to use more than 100 GB for photos and videos on your Mac or iPhone, keep the library in iCloud well below 500GB.
Have you enabled "Optimise Mac Storage" in both places? There are two settings for this:
Turn it on in both places, if you only enabled one of them.
How large is your Photos Library in iCloud? Even with Optimize Mac Storage enabled the optimized versions stored locally on your Mac will need local storage on your Mac, as Ralph explained. As an estimate - they may take up to 10% to 20% of the storage used in iCloud. This will depend on format of your original image files. I would not let the iCloud Photos Library get larger in iCloud than five times the size of the storage you can afford for your photos on your device with the least storage. For example, if you do not want to use more than 100 GB for photos and videos on your Mac or iPhone, keep the library in iCloud well below 500GB.
iCloud is a sync service, everything that you do on one device will be synced to iCloud and all other devices.
There is no practical way to use iCloud a delete some photos from only one device.
Even with optimised storage the local photos will need space, they will be smaller but they are still stored on your MacBook.
Are you talking about two different MacBooks?
You wrote:
The storage on my MacBook Air is full (mostly with photos). I have iCloud Photos enabled and space optimization toggled on.
and below you wrote:
Also, this is a new MacBook Air that has never been enabled to store photos.
One option could be to move you library to an external SSD, that will reduce the space need on you MacBook.
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
You must follow the instructions, if you pick the wrong format you will get big problems / can destroy your data.
Ralf
Thank you for your help. My MacBook is currently showing photo storage at 144GB and Cloud storage is at 177GB, far far more than 10-20%. Seems like something isn't working properly.
This is a new MacBook Air. Could there be something that happened when I moved over from my old MacBook Pro?
Thanks!
Optimize Storage will only kick in, when it is necessary to free storage. Photos will keep the recently downloaded photos stored locally, just in case you will need them again, and only remove them, if you need a lot of storage for something else. This is done to avoid repeated downloads for the same items.
Unless you are filling all available storage with other data yourself, Photos will use free storage to cache photos locally, until the storage is needed. There should be no need to force Photos to free storage instantly.
Why are photos taking up memory space on Mac when iCloud Photos is on as is space optimization?
