Do shared albums take up space on my devices?

Cheese a holic......a search brought me to this post of yours. I am new to the mac and need to know how to import my photos to the NAS. How did you do it? I honestly don't want to mess with the iCloud or PHOTOS on my MAC, I just want to go straight from the device to the NAS. HELP 🙂

snewsie wrote:

Cheese a holic......a search brought me to this post of yours. I am new to the mac and need to know how to import my photos to the NAS. How did you do it? I honestly don't want to mess with the iCloud or PHOTOS on my MAC, I just want to go straight from the device to the NAS. HELP 🙂

That is not possible - the Photos library can only be on a locally connected drive that is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) - it can not be on a NAS

You can backup the photos (not the library) by exporting to the NAS

LN

Hello Cheese, I was told in a recent call to Apple that shared album photos do not take up space on the devices of the people you share with, so I am assuming the shared album doesn't take up extra space on my devices as well and everything is linked to the cloud copy. I think that this makes sense because if you notice when you open Sharing there is an Activity view which shows all the pictures again and in a sequence of time added. This would make 3 copies if they weren't just linking the originals. Not sure I can prove my theory though.

Thanks Cheese,

I actually just tried that...I guess I will download into photos and then just export to NAS in batches. Thank you! And I also have the same issue with the shared photos. My husband dumps so many into that shared album I feel like it's clogging my device but evidently not. My iPhone says storage is almost full but I literally only have 30 photos on it but the photo storage shows 4g used by photos?

So I can free up space on my device by adding photos to shared albums, then deleting the original?

But only, if you are satisfied with a reduced image quality.

The photos in the Shared albums have a reduced pixel size. You will want to save the high quality originals somewhere.

I just wanted a way I could reduce the size taken up by photos on my devices, while still retaining some photos on there...

that is iCloud Photo Library with optimized photos on devices with limited storage

LN

I've never been able to figure out how shared photos are stored, one of my complaints with Photos. It is very confusing for large libraries on the storage, I have about 15 GB of photos on my device, many of which are in "shared library" I will try deleting the original out of the "all photos" and see what happens. I have the original stored in a conventional folder format, so I know I won't lose them.

The answer to your simple question was easy while running the earlier MacOS X versions, with iPhoto and Aperture on MacOS X 10.10. or earlier - the shared albums were stored in your user library in a subfolder of ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/,

but since I upgraded to El Capitan and iCloud Photo Library with Photos for Mac, I cannot find them anywhere outside the Photos Library when browsing through the library folder. They seem to have been moved.

With FindAnyFile I managed to track down some of my Shared albums in this folder - a cached folder in the sandbox; it cannot be the long term storage for the shared albums, but all photos from the shared albums are duplicated there:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.cloudphotosd/Data/Library/Application Support/com.apple.cloudphotosd/services/com.apple.photo.icloud.sharedstreams/as sets/

Sorry but this is the Photos for Mac forum so all posts here should be related to Photos for Mac - posts about IOS devices or any subject other than Photos for Mac should not be here but in the correct forum for the question - if you call your Ford dealer with questions you are not going to be answers about your Chevy

Here you will get answers about Photos for Mac

LN