Ulfbilting

Q: I have about 50Gb of photos in a old folder. When I try to import it having "without copying" setting, the photo library folder/file still grows to 40Gb  with all its thumbnails and other stuff. Is this the way it should be? Really?

Import to Photos:

I have about 50Gb of photos in a old folder. When I try to import it having "without copying" setting, the photo library folder/file still grows to 40Gb  with all its thumbnails and other stuff. Is this the way it should be? Really?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Apr 10, 2015 4:20 AM

Close

Q: I have about 50Gb of photos in a old folder. When I try to import it having "without copying" setting, the photo library folder/fi ... more

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Apr 10, 2015 4:29 AM in response to Ulfbilting
    Level 10 (107,185 points)
    iCloud
    Apr 10, 2015 4:29 AM in response to Ulfbilting
    When I try to import it having "without copying" setting, the photo library folder/file still grows to 40Gb  with all its thumbnails and other stuff. Is this the way it should be? Really?

    If the original images are small, the thumbnails may indeed be nearly as large as the originals. You will notice a larger difference in size, if the original images are gigantic RAW files, but for small jpegs the size of he thumbs may be the same as the original.

  • by asanchezl,

    asanchezl asanchezl Apr 10, 2015 4:54 AM in response to Ulfbilting
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 10, 2015 4:54 AM in response to Ulfbilting

    Same problem here. Before importing I unchecked the 'Copy Items to the Photos Library' and I imported files from a folder from 'Pictures'. However, this option never worked because the size of the library increased almost in the same amount as the that of the original folder/files. I have searched in different websites but not many people have this problem. Anyone else with this problem? did anyone solve it?

     

     

    MacBook Retina 13-inch Mid2014 2.6Ghz 256 Gb

  • by denizzzio,

    denizzzio denizzzio Apr 10, 2015 2:16 PM in response to asanchezl
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 10, 2015 2:16 PM in response to asanchezl

    Same to me.

    I'm not going to duplicate ll my library from external HDD to Photos Library. It has no sense.

     

    Is it possible not to copy to Library and leave all originals on HDD. Otherwise Photos.app is totally useless.

  • by Stefano Pini,

    Stefano Pini Stefano Pini Apr 11, 2015 7:38 AM in response to Ulfbilting
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 7:38 AM in response to Ulfbilting

    I've the same problem, original folder size is more or less the same size of the Photo Library!

    The strange thing is that my picture files are big (~10MB each), make not sense that the preview library is so big, Photo in this case is Unusable, is like a picture duplicate...

     

    Lightroom can do this trick without any problem, external disk folder is about 70GB, the Lightroom Library is about 7GB, 10% of the real size.

     

    Any suggestion is appreciated,

    Thanks all

    Stefano

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Apr 11, 2015 7:43 AM in response to denizzzio
    Level 10 (107,185 points)
    iCloud
    Apr 11, 2015 7:43 AM in response to denizzzio

    The Photos Library can be on your external drive as an entity.

     

    Photos has an option to import references with the originals on the external drive, just like iPhoto had (Preferences > General > Importing). But there is not much support to fix broken references. It is saver to store the complete library on the external drive than using a referenced library with only the originals on the external drive.

  • by nathan_h,

    nathan_h nathan_h Apr 11, 2015 8:38 AM in response to Ulfbilting
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 8:38 AM in response to Ulfbilting

    I am having the same problem.  There simply isn't room on my hard drive for my photos to take up twice their actual size/space by having Photos create duplicates of them all. 

     

    I chose the option to NOT have Photos copy everything when importing, but that option appears to not work as intended, yet.

  • by Stefano Pini,

    Stefano Pini Stefano Pini Apr 11, 2015 12:42 PM in response to Ulfbilting
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Apr 11, 2015 12:42 PM in response to Ulfbilting

    Thanks Leonie,

    Like your suggestion I triyed to use an external file system mounted as NFS but Photos say that can't create a Library with this error:

     

    'Photos does not have the necessary permissions to create a library in the folder that you selected.'

     

    So it seems that we can't also use an external mount point in this way...

    Remember that Photos need double the space if you want to keep your original picture files...

    I think that this is very bad, we are getting worse instead than improve

     

    Any idea?

     

    Thanks

    Stefano

  • by léonie,

    léonie léonie Apr 11, 2015 12:49 PM in response to Stefano Pini
    Level 10 (107,185 points)
    iCloud
    Apr 11, 2015 12:49 PM in response to Stefano Pini

    I triyed to use an external file system mounted as NFS but Photos say that can't create a Library with this error:

    Any photo library needs to be on a locally connected disk, and the disk needs to be formatted MacOS Extended (Journaled).

     

    Like described here for Aperture and iPhoto: Use locally mounted Mac OS X Extended volumes for your Aperture library