Photos disk space usage

I don't know about iCloud but it seems that this big model resources folder is linked with face recognition, it contains close up thumbnails of faces.

Mine is 25GB, very annoying as you can't change any settings in the automated face scanning of your library or easily get rid of those hundreds of useless and unknown faces from events, concerts, school pictures...

I did the beta test of Yosemite with it and found that the Photo library was about 50% bigger than the iPhoto library.

Hey Philbee,

This may provide some of the answers you're looking for.

Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries - Apple Support

I also have about 90gb of photo files in an external disc and as iPhoto only used about 12gb of library space the Photos app uses around 65gb!

Any idea on what to do? I have a 256gb ssd and don't want to fill it up with copies of photos I have stored on an external 2tb disc.

it could be because the side bar images are square, maybe it caches the square cropped images. Theres a setting to not crop the thumbnails on the sidebar.

wonder if that does anything.

i have noticed that it's way faster now than in beta. The cache probably helps speed it up a lot.

Sorry, I had not read the entire post. But you both have provided some very interesting details that will hopefully help others with their Photos issues. Personally I still prefer using Aperture as well.

Hi Philbee,

same problem here: I used Aperture with 'referenced' masters on my NAS (QNAP). My Aperture library was on the iMac's internal SSD. I migrated the library to Photos and now the situation is as follows:

• Masters ~ 95 GB (for both, Aperture and Photos). On my NAS.
• Aperture library was about 23 GB which seems reasonable since it did not contain the masters.
• Photos library is 55 GB (!!!) despite I did select 'do not copy files into library' in Preferences
• Inside the HUGE Photos library (package), the by-far largest folder is 'resources' with about 40 GB (!!!). If I did deeper, I find a lot of original photos and videos inside the subfolder 'model resources' (inside 'resources'). Why the **** are they here?

Otherwise I could imagine to use Photos but I hope Apple will fix this waste-of-SSD-space!

What if you deleted the 'masters' off your hard drive once they have been uploaded into the cloud? Anyone know?

Right now my library is taking up 130GB of valuable space on my hard drive...which I need back.

The whole point in moving everything to the cloud was to free up space (especially considering the tiny SSD drives included on most modern Macs).

You would think the obvious answer would be to include a user setting that says 'reduce internal library to XXGB' once files are in the cloud.

It's a bug there from the fist beta. I'm using 10.10.3 since public beta 1 and the problem is present in every revision. I've sent a feedback but had no answer at all.

If you disable copying images to library, Photos creates a copy of every single pic and put it in model resource folder (...sometime this copy is even bigger than the original one). Only way to stop this behavior and save space is to let Photos copy pics into library. In this way moderesouce folder is only a few Mbs.

Unfortunately it seems that Apple doesn't care...

Regards,

Giorgio

From what has been posted here I believe that it is the referenced library selection (which is not recommended in any case) that caused this space issue - trash the Photoa library an try it again with an managed library and see what the results are

And if you have been using Aperture you probably are not going to like Photos anyway and will probably continue using Aperture or move to a different program than Photos

LN