Q: Safely delete Photos from Mac
My girlfriend has a MBA an it is full (less than 2gb).
It looks like the culprit is Photos, hogging about 30% of her 128gb drive. She never uses the application, ever (although she still uses iCloud to back up all the photos from her phone).
I have turned off iCloud Photo Library/Photo Stream/Photo-sharing inside the Photos app, assuming it would just remove them. But it appears they are all saved locally.
If they are ALL backed up to iCloud, and I have those syncing options turned off, can I delete the Photos.app contents? What I want to avoid is her logging back in one day, noticing they are all missing, then just wiping them from her iCloud account.
Photos, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)
Posted on Jul 12, 2016 8:24 PM
If iCloud Photo Library has been disabled, deleting the Photos library from the Mac will not erase the photos from iCloud. Copy the Photos Library to an external drive to have a backup, just to be sure, before you delete the Photos Library from the Pictures folder. If she had "Optimize Storage" enabled, there may not be many full size originals of her photos in the local library anyway, just smaller, optimized versions.
To keep her photos save she needs to download the originals from iCloud to have a local backup copy of her photos available. Does she have an external backup drive?
Is the Photos Library a migrated iPhoto Library? Then she may need to delete the iPhoto Library as well, if it is still there, before the storage will be released (see: Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries - Apple Support).
Posted on Jul 12, 2016 11:39 PM