Size of Photos library far too large

40GB - come on, that's just ridiculous! What is going on? All I want to do is to be able to browse my images and have different collections.

Ctrl-click your Photos library and use the command "Show Package Contents".

Then check the size of the subfolders - Masters - Previews -Thumbnails - resources.

Which of these folders are large?

Photos needs Thumbnails, Previews, additional resources to speed up browsing, and if you are using iCloud Photo Library, it will keep optimised versions of your images.

1. Referenced libraries do not work well with Photos / iCloud Photo Library. You should not use them.

2. If you read Apple's description of Photos, you would know that both, iPhoto and Photos use hard links, which means that they both point to the same "original" files on your drive. The Photos Library does not duplicate the images and you have not lost much free disk space for it, I spite of what it looks like in Finder.

Hi there,

I've got the same problem. I have about 150 GB of photos that I keep out of the Photos library. But since I upgraded to the new Photos app, the Photos library started to grow gradually now reaching 70 GB of space and taking all my free storage space. All this is taken by the directory called Resources in the Photos library bundle. I see that it contains full sized random photos. I wonder if it's save to delete that directory.

The old iPhoto library was taking only about 15 GB., while all my photos resided outside of it.

Overall library size is 665.5MB, looking at the package contents it shows 'resources' as 579.5MB. Within that folder the largest folder is 'modelresources' at 577.2MB.

But then your Library is less than 1GB? that is not bad for a library with 70GB of images.

Delving into the many folders within shows full sized copies of the images so Photos looks like it has copied the originals into the library. Dropping into the console shows them as real files, not hard/soft links.

Hard links will look in the Console like real files; the only way to see, if a file is a hardline is by comparing the inode numbers. Files are hard linked, if they have identical indoor numbers, as shown by "ls -i".

If one of the imported originals has been imported as "managed", it will show in the "Masters" folder. For a refeencedlibrary the "Masters" folder is empty. And you cannot reveal "Managed" files in the Finder with the command "Fils > Show referenced file in Finder", but for referenced files you can.

pdd1970 wrote:

Overall library size is 665.5MB, looking at the package contents it shows 'resources' as 579.5MB. Within that folder the largest folder is 'modelresources' at 577.2MB.

Delving into the many folders within shows full sized copies of the images so Photos looks like it has copied the originals into the library

Are you sure these are full sized copies of the originals? On my system, everything I have checked so far in modelresources are what appear to be either cropped faces from shots where I added a name to a face or crops Photos thinks might be a face.

The Photos.app is saving space by using hard links to the files it imports. So migrating an iPhoto Library or Aperture Library to Phots will not need much extra storage.

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

Try 500GB library!

After talking to five different Apple "Geniuses" and given the wrong info every time, I fiddled with this and found that;

a) if your library is too large you might need to move it to an external drive. Photos will double the storage used originally.

b) "referenced/hard links" files still make storage unavailable and you WILL run out

c) if you move the library to an external drive, You can still use iCloud if you don't have enough memory in your computer by making the external drive the main library. "Use as system Photo Library" in settings.

d) 60k photos takes over a week to upload at 50mb/s

e) you will be forced to buy iCloud storage

I LOVE being able to see ALL my pictures on my iPhone!

I had over 30K+images externally referenced off a secondary partition in iPhoto and Aperture. My iPhoto database was showing about 30 GB in my Picture folder before I imported it into Photos.

After importing, my Photos database has steadily grown to about 75 GB. I may have added about 4 GB of externally referenced images since the conversion to Photos, but that doesn't account for the increase in 45 GB of the database.

In checking the packages content of the Photos database, the largest size is the resources folder, at about 50 GB.

I also use Picasa to upload images to Google+ to share with friends and family and it does nothing of this sort. Its database is miniscule compared to iPhoto or Photos despite the fact that it references the same pictures off my secondary volume, and I make basic edits like straighten, crop, and contrast before uploading/sharing online. There is no need to import anything because it monitors my photo folder and automatically shows new photos when they are added to the folder.

I am running out of disc space on my main partition and don't understand how the Photos database has swelled so much. Only reason I have used iPhoto so far is because I can sync my 5-star rated photos (Smart Album) with AppleTV, but the issue with the growing size of the Photos database has left me seriously reconsidering whether I want to continue using Photos to manage my pictures.

I've got the exact same problem with Photos. I emptied the model resources directory under Resources without this having any effect on my library.

It started to fill itself again though, so I guess the solution for me is to clean it from time to time - not perfect.

Of course I recommend that you have a back-up of the Photos library before attempting this step.

Good to know the modal resources can be deleted without affecting Photos. When it recreates it, does it fill up to the same size as before or is it optimized and smaller than before?

It's growing slowly. Currently at 3.5 GB. I think every time I use Photos it becomes slightly larger even without making any changes. So I guess it will fill up the disk again but it might take some time. Then I'll just empty it again. I would prefer not to have to care about this and I hope they will fix it in a future update.

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

@giopiar84 - Are you saying the large Photos library (modal resources folder) issue only occurs when using referenced images?

The reason I use referenced images is because my main drive does not have enough space to import my entire photo library. I have my photos organized on a large secondary drive exactly the way I want; I don't want iPhoto or Photos to "manage" the photos in it's own directory structure.