Mac storage full during upload to iCloud Photo Library

Hi,

I had the same issue.

The new Photos app uses a library separate from iPhoto. You can find both of them in your ~/Pictures folder. Once Photos has created its library (from the iPhotos one), it _seems_ to be safe to remove the old iPhotos one. Doing this will free up a lot of space, or did for me, at least.

However, please be sure that you have a backup of the iPhotos library before you do this! I could be wrong (or deranged), or your machine's setup might be different, or perhaps your Photos library hasn't correctly built from iPhotos. Etc.

Something pretty neat seems to happening when Photos creates its library from iPhotos because my machine didn't have anything like enough storage to achieve this (I had about 15 Gig free, and my iPhotos library was about 100 Gig). I suspect that it Photos probably shares the images files with iPhoto in some way, but I don't know. Anyway – removing the iPhoto library did still fee up lots of space for me.

I'm don't know why Photos increases its storage requirement during the upload phase. Perhaps it has to keep all the original images locally until they are all uploaded, rather than removing the high quality images as it goes along. I've decided to keep the high resolution images locally anyway now: they're useful for printing and such.

Can we delete our photos and/or iPhoto library from mac after uploading all images to iCloud?

Isn't it working like a "sync" ?

One question - do you have TimeMachine turned on? My Mac appeared not to start re-arranging files until I turned this on.

I had a similar issue, with only about 5GB of storage, but once my Mac had uploaded the initial lot to iCloud and I turned TimeMachine on, it appeared to start rearranging files. My MacBook Air 128GB is now optimising storage for around 10% free.

I can only upload around 12GB of photos to the Mac at a time, but I have done this may be 6 times now and each time it eventually increases storage back to 12GB free.

I ran into the same problem and it perplexed me for days. At first, I thought I'd have to upgrade to El Capitan to fix it, but after reading the reviews, I decided to hold off. Then after reading this thread, I decided to try something and just rename and move the Photos library to another folder in the home directory -- nothing more than that. And lo and behold, that "unclogged" the process and now my Photos library is synced with icloud.com and my iOS devices. I did move the Photos library back to where it was and rename it back to Photos, by the way ... all seems fine so far. I can't explain it, but that's what I did to fix this problem.

You can delete the iPhotos Library, but you can't delete photos from the Photos application. Deleting photos from there will delete them from iCloud.