Hi, I have moved my Photos folder to an external hard drive. I seems to be working fine. However when I check to see free space on my internal drive it stays constantly "calculating" and the spinning wheel next to the photos icon is also spinning. I would have thought that as the "Photos" has been moved to an external disk, this Photos icon wouldn't show when looking at storage. It does seem to prevent the calculation to finish.
Mac mini, macOS 14.1
Try rebuilding the Spotlight index on the drives: How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support
Try rebuilding the Spotlight index on the drives: How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support
Spotlight is the search mechanism in all Mac Systems.
If its index is not updated, usually automatically, it can report erroneous space used and available. If one is seeing erroneous values then a manual rebuild of the index is recommend.
I would reindex the entire drive. Then open the Search window and start a search.
As I recall there will be a small text notification that indexing is taking place. It would take about 30+ minutes to complete.
Please read the following user tip and restate your question/problem in detail:
Writing an Effective Apple Support Communities Question - Apple Community
What model and year is your Mac?
What system and Photos versions are you running?
How much RAM. do you have?
How much free space on the boot drive and external drive do you have?
How is the external drive formatted and connected to your Mac?
What fixes have you attempted so far?
What model and year is your Mac? 2023 Mac mini M2 Pro (its a week old today)
What system and Photos versions are you running? Photos and Lightroom
How much RAM. do you have? 16gb
How much free space on the boot drive and external drive do you have? Depends on where I look. On “about this Mac” I have 319gb of 494gb available. On disk utility Macintosh HD is states How319gb available (194 purgable)
How is the external drive formatted and connected to your Mac? AFPS and USB C
What fixes have you attempted so far? None really. I contacted Apple support but they didn’t offer a solution.
Regards
Brian
Sorry, that went way past my pay grade. What is spotlight and what am I trying to achieve by following your instructions. Do you know why I get conflicting available storage depending on where I look?
Aha! I have used Macs for 20 years and never knew the search thing was called Spotlight. I have been driving a car for over 50 years, but don't ask me to try to repair it <LOL>. Thanks for having the patience to explain it to me. Is the rebuild idiot proof? I know you have sent me a link telling me how to do it. But my ability is amoeba level. Wish me luck. Your support is appreciated. Thank you.
OK, So I have followed the instructions and added, then removed a folder. How can I tell if it is actually indexing. I have opened the activity monitor and found mdworker under the CPU column. I see _spotlight but the figures dont seem to change.
HI, Old Toad, Just to let you know that I carried out your advice and the storage availability on both Disk Utility and About my Mac are now the same. I cannot thank you enough for your help. I am quite useless at back room work on Macs (or anything else to be honest). I have no idea why they were showing different amounts of availability and what doing a reindex did to resolve it. But it did and that is all down to you. Many, many thanks. I can now get on with enjoying my new Mac instead of constantly being frustrated that something was wrong. I do have one more question: I have multiple files called Previously Located items in the users shared folder. What do I do with them?
If I can do it it's idiot proof.
Storage details internal disk
