Photos taking up significantly more space on my Mac then my iPhone

Question

Photos taking up significantly more space on my Mac then my iPhone

I have 2TB of iCloud, and iCloud photos turned on on both my iPhone and Mac; however, photos are taking up significantly more space on my Mac than on my iPhone, even though both of them have the same settings turned on.

Both my Mac and my iPhone have "Optimized Storage" turned on, and again, both are supposed to synch to iCloud. The problem is that photos take up 12GB on my iPhone and 267GB on my Mac.

I understand that iCloud isn't an off-device storage feature but a synching feature and that the amount of storage that photos take up on each device is going to be a little different, but that big of a difference is just really weird, and a significant amount more storage being taken up makes me think that my Mac isn't actually syncing.

I've already tried resetting the synching feature by turning off the synch and turning it back on, but that didn't do anything (increase or decrease the storage when it was off or on, respectively).

Has anyone had a problem with this or a workaround?

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.0

Posted on Sep 10, 2024 10:26 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

muguy

Level 10

81,613 points

Sep 10, 2024 10:34 AM in response to Ashtongilbert

It's expected. The optimized photos on your phone will be smaller than those on your Mac. And, if your Mac has space available, you may not have optimized versions at all yet.

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Answer 2

Sep 10, 2024 10:46 AM in response to Ashtongilbert

Expanding on muggy's explanation: "Optimize Storage" means that the Mac may keep only smaller versions of pictures to save space, as needed. It will then grab full sized images from iCloud, when needed.

The price you pay for saving storage space is that it will take a bit more time to load files from iCloud if the full pictures are not kept locally, possibly slowing your work. So the Mac only saves space when necessary. If your Mac's free disk space gets down toward 10%, then you should see dramatic reductions. Space is usually more limited on an iPhone, so more reduction in Library size is, as muguy said, "expected."

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