Philbee

Q: Photos disk space usage

I don't quite understand what Photos does: it uses 3 times as much disk space as Aperture for the same library.

 

My Aperture library with some 53k photos (~200GB on external SSD) and a few hundred videos (~100GB on external SSD) uses around 40GB disk space for thumbnails in various sizes, database and so on.

 

After a few hours of importing, the same library in Photos has grown to 119.9GB.

Settings are: do not copy images to library, no use of iCloud Photo Library (and thus no "optimize Mac space usage").

Inside the library file, the Thumbnails directory uses a sane-looking 16.66GB, Previews is 7.29GB, and Masters uses only 1.35GB, since almost all images are still stored in Aperture referenced masters on external SSD.

 

The largest directory inside the library is Resources > model resources, with a whopping 86GB for 147k objects (images).

I'm almost sure these are a result of my trying and then disabling iCloud Photo Library during import yesterday afternoon.

Since Photos does not delete those resources for some reason (disk space and RAM are always cheap and plentiful for Apple, I guess) – is there a way for me to get rid of it if I don't want iCloud Photo Library? Would Photos be smart enough to start culling images here when my system disk space, a paltry 256GB SSD, dwindles towards zero?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2013), iOS 7.0.4

Posted on Apr 10, 2015 10:56 PM

Close

Q: Photos disk space usage

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

Previous Page 2
  • by LarryHN,

    LarryHN LarryHN May 11, 2015 9:48 AM in response to Philbee
    Level 10 (84,585 points)
    Photos for Mac
    May 11, 2015 9:48 AM in response to Philbee

    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

  • by Stephen Braitsch,

    Stephen Braitsch Stephen Braitsch May 23, 2015 7:29 PM in response to Philbee
    Level 1 (5 points)
    May 23, 2015 7:29 PM in response to Philbee

Previous Page 2