How Can I reduce the thumbnail size in Photo app

Question

Level 1

8 points

How Can I reduce the thumbnail size in Photo app

When I add my photos to Photo App, it is creating thumbnails:

71K 13 oct 15:29 UNADJUSTEDNONRAW_mini_7e5.jpg

171K 13 oct 15:29 UNADJUSTEDNONRAW_thumb_7e5.jpg

I have to index several thousands of photos and the big size thumbnail is really taking a lot of storage. I would like to reduce the quality of those thumbnails or keeping only the "mini" one.

In the Apperture App there was a setting for this, I do not find the equivalent on Mac Photo App (high Sierra)

Thank you for your help.

Posted on Oct 14, 2017 7:49 AM

Reply

Answer 1

LarryHN

Level 10

106,142 points

Oct 14, 2017 7:56 AM in response to JPhi-M

That is not a feature of Photos - you can request that Apple add it - Product Feedback - Apple

You can not make any change to the structure of content of the Photos library - and of course those are not large file, they are tiny - several thousand 171 KB files only add up to a few hundred MB - not even to 1 GB

LN

Reply

Answer 2

Yer_Man

Level 10

165,972 points

Oct 14, 2017 7:54 AM in response to JPhi-M

There is no such setting, and frankly, if you're worried about the space these take then you need to move your library to a more capacious disk.

Reply

Answer 3

LarryHN

Level 10

106,142 points

Oct 14, 2017 8:21 AM in response to JPhi-M

OK - the answer is still that there is no feature in Photos to change that - you can either use Photos or use other software, you can not redesign Photos to fit your personal needs - and of course with 40,000 RAW images 12 GB is a tiny amount f additional storage

LN

Reply

Answer 4

JPhi-M Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 14, 2017 8:16 AM in response to LarryHN

That was an example and I have other that are much more:

452K 13 oct 15:28 ./07/00/71b/UNADJUSTEDNONRAW_thumb_71b.jpg

for now I have only 2014 files, that represents 660M:

# find . -name *thumb* | xargs ls -alh | wc -l

2014

I will import almost 40000 photos in Photos so I could expect a size around 12GB just for thumbnails.

Reply

Answer 5

JPhi-M Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 14, 2017 8:21 AM in response to léonie

Hi Leonie,

I know that but I would like to chose myself the level of quality of this thumbnails. I will post a suggestion to Apple. Let see if the consider.

Anyway thank you for your quick response.

Reply

Answer 6

léonie

Level 10

200,645 points

Oct 14, 2017 8:11 AM in response to JPhi-M

In the Apperture App there was a setting for this, I do not find the equivalent on Mac Photo App (high Sierra)

In Aperture was a preference setting to prevent the creation of previews or to reduce the quality, but if you wanted to remove the thumbnails, you would have to dig into the Aperture Library.

Photos needs the local thumbnails, so it can show something when browsing the library, even if the originals of your library are in iCloud and may be offline.

Reply