My hard disk is full. Checking my hard disk I see that I still have an 'iPhoto' library of 23GB and a 'photo' library of 13GB. I use the 'optimise' setting in photos. Why is 'photos' not adjusting to my storage requirements? Why di I still have an 'iPhoto' library?
imac, Mac OS X (10.3.7)
Your Photo Library and your iPhoto Library are sharing image files by hard links. When you migrated the iPhoto Library to Phots, the new Photos Library created hard links to the images in your iPhoto Library. This way the image files in both libraries are using the same storage on your hard drive. The look both large, but the storage is only used once. If you delete photos from your Photos library, the storage will only be released, if you delete the photo from your iPhoto Library as well. See: Six Colors: The (hard) link between Photos and iPhoto
and also: Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries - Apple Support
As long as you are keeping the iPhoto Library around, the "Optimize storage" will need additional storage for the optimized versions, because the full resolution originals are still kept for the iPhoto Library. Copy you iPhoto Library to a backup drive and then delete it from your Mac, if you no longer are using iPhoto.
Storage problems, 'photos' and 'iphoto'
