How to identify if my photos are on my Mac Studio or on iCloud?

Newbie-NHDSWB wrote: How can I tell if my photos are physically on my Mac Studio or on iCloud only? …

Using the Photos app, right? Since you're not giving details, I have to give lots of possibilities:

If you don't have iCloud turned on, then anything you see is on your Mac.

If you have iCloud turned on but you don't have "Optimize Storage" turned on in Photos' Settings>iCloud, then anything you see is on your Mac.

If you have Photos' Optimize Storage turned on, then the Mac may keep only a preview copy locally and rely on iCloud for the originals. Here things are a bit iffy, in part because of the "may" word. If there's room, the Mac may keep some full sized originals locally.

But, in order to edit or crop a picture, you need to have the original. So if you go to edit, and you see a little circle gradually filling up, then it's probably pulling that original file from iCloud.So that's the way we tell if the original file is local. (However, I'm seeing that happen a bit even for large images held locally.)

I use "Optimize" on my Phone, but I don't use "Optimize" for Photos on my Mac, because backups then would not be including full sized images. I backup my pictures to an external Time Machine drive, and I periodically copy the entire Library to a different archive drive.

If you don't have enough disk space on your Mac to avoid "Optimize," then you can use an external drive to hold the Library. I prefer to use an external drive to hold other stuff, and I keep Photos' System Library on my internal drive.

How's that?

Assembler? That as already a convenient programming language. Sometimes had to correct my running programs in the Core Storage by toggling in the corrected binary code using the binary switches at the front panel of the computer. 😄 I loved the old times when I could watch a program working by looking at the variables in the core memory. It has been hard to get accustomed to computers being a black box with "No Entry" signs everywhere.

But back to the original question: When you enable iCloud Photos and enable "Download originals" in the Photos > Settings > iCloud, Phots will download shadow copies of the originals from iCloud to your Mac at its leisure.

But Photos does not have a status indicator to tell us, if all originals have already been downloaded or if some of them still need downloading. The status message "Synced with iCloud just now" does only mean, that Photos is aware of any changes, but not that all originals have been copied to the Mac. There is also no indicator, which items still doing need downloading.

I am using brute force, to check, if my library has been completely downloaded.

• I copy the Photos Library to an external drive.
• When I open the copy in Photos, I will get a warning, if items are incomplete and originals need downloading and this copy does not suffice as a backup.
• Power Photos will us, which items are incomplete, so that I can force a download by using these items.

Newbie-NHDSWB wrote: … I do have iCloud turned on on my Mac Studio, but not my iPhone or iPad since I prefer to "clean up" photos and keep only what I want.

The purpose of using iCloud Photos is to synchronize the Photos Libraries on your different devices. There isn't much point in using iCloud if you only turn it on for one device.

On a Mac you can have more than one Photos Library. I have an archive Library and a Favorites Library. The Favorites is obviously much smaller, and it is the one connected to iCloud so that I can see and share those pictures on my iPhone and iPad.

I could sign out of iCloud, then see what is on my Mac itself.

It's not clear to me what you could get from that. If you disconnect your Photos Library from iCloud, Photos on your Mac would look the same until, as I said, you try to edit a picture.

Newbie-NHDSWB wrote:

Thanks for the additional perspective, Keith. But surely the images are stored as files?

They are stored as files – but you are meant to keep your hands off, except in very limited ways. Like backing up or restoring the entire photo library. Or editing or exporting photos using the tools Photos provides. Or sending a photo to an external application from within the Photos Editing screens.

If you mess around with the organization of the files within the Photos library, you risk breaking some relationship between the files that Photos depends upon for proper operation.

And if you are using iCloud Photos, you must set up Photos so that it imports photos into its libraries. It is fairly obvious why Photos would want to be in control of the files in the system Photos Library (the one synchronized with iCloud), so it can carry out synchronization in the background. But the control for import vs. reference is a global one that affects all of your Photos Libraries - including the local-only ones.

I don't bother with iCloud, I know my originals are safe in my library. The point of Photos is that you deal in *images*, not files. You let Photos do all the file management.

If you don't want that - which is fine - then Photos might not be for you and you might want to look at another DAM.

(And many of us are "That old")

Newbie-NHDSWB wrote: … But surely the images are stored as files?

When I look at a picture in Photos, that picture never existed as a file. The picture was created on the fly by Photos from information in a file together with information in a database. If I export that picture to Finder, Photos then creates a file. (To speed things up, Photos does maintain thumbnails and some preview files.) The original file may have come from my Nikon, but when I edited it, Photos recorded the edits. When I request the picture, the instructions in the Photos app together with its database, the data, and the original picture are used to create the image that I see. So the information that makes the image is stored in several files--but the image is not in a file.

Since images are handled as information rather than as simple files, then there is less wasted storage space, and complex operations like searches with facial recognition or object classification can be much faster.

The files that contain the information are stored in the Photos Library, a "package" that is usually found in the Pictures folder. Because it is not the files, but rather the connections among the files that makes the pictures, the "package" discourages people from messing around inside.

I hope that helps a bit…

Is a database record a file?

Richard already answered.

Why think in terms of "files" when what you want are "images"? That is actually counterproductive, as Richard said, this way edits are done non-destructively and when you want a file, you can get one in any format Photos supports without loss from translating from one file type to another.

Sometimes us old guys need to work with a new paradigm.

Keith Barkley wrote: (And many of us are "That old")

I programmed on an IBM 1620 that took up a room and had 16K of memory. It had flashing lights on the front like in the movies. I used machine language (meaning all numbers) and assembly language.

Do I win?

"They are stored as files"

Not exactly. To Richard's point, if you edit an original, other than a low res thumbnail, there is no "file" representing your edit. It is created on the fly as needed.

If you do your own organization, and you edit a file, you are overwriting the original with the edit, and any further edits might have generational loss from re-compression.

Newbie-NHDSWB wrote: Well, maybe. I started with IBM 1401, programming in assembler and SPS - but never machine language. I remember those flashing lights, card readers, and printers spewing paper when the paper tapes broke.

I, too, used a 1401-- way more sophisticated! The 1620 was like playing with legos-- you were right in the heart of the thing, and you could actually watch your program progress through the steps by watching the lights blink!

Ah--Core Memory! léonie gets it!