Best way to manage large Photos library?

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Level 1

8 points

Best way to manage large Photos library?

Hoping someone in the community can help me out. I have conducted NUMEROUS web searches and seem to get 100 different answers/recommendations.

A bit of background - have a 2011 iMac and was experiencing extreme sluggishness when Photos open; e.g. was taking "hours" to download photos from iPhone to Mac. It was also failing to import a lot of photos, unless I batched the imports into smaller chunks - bottom line, it was acting very suspiciously. After some investigation, was informed the 1TB hard drive was corrupted/damaged. I backed up everything and moved Photos and iTunes libraries to an external drive. Then I had the 1TB hard drive replaced with a 250GB SSD drive with a clean install of OSX. Running Sierra 10.12.6. The Mac has 4GB of RAM.

The Photos library is 54,100 photos and is 222GB in size (all photos since 2008 and my wife takes a lot of pictures. 🙂). When I opened it from the external drive on the "new" Mac, it took about 30 minutes to open (was "updating library"). The machine seems to be working OK but I do fear that this large Photos library is going to continue to sap resources unless something is done about it.

Also of note: BEFORE the hard drive was replaced, I ran the Repair utility on the old Photos library. The repaired version was a bit smaller, but also removed the most recent "year"s worth of photos approximately. I'm currently working with the old "full" library.

My questions are:

1) Should a library of 54,100 photos be 222GB in size? I have seen other references online that have half the photos and the library is 20% of the size, etc. Does this ratio seem accurate or is something else going on?

2) Is there any benefit to running the repair utility again now that I have a "new" Mac? Or is the problem likely in the old library regardless of where it's stored?

3) I plan on purchasing one of the de-duplicate utilities that exist as I know there are some older photos that are duplicates (and probably a number of HDR duplicates as well), and they should all be cleaned up.

4) What is the best course of action for managing a large Photos library? Would using Aperature (as opposed to Photos) help?

5) Does anyone have any recommendations about potentially "splitting" the massive library into smaller libraries (say by year)? What are the pros/cons of this approach? I know you'd have to switch libraries to view, but this might be agreeable to us. We typically create albums and put those in the cloud so anything we really want to view is available via that approach regardless.

6) If splitting the library is a good solution, what's the best approach to this? Aperature, or?

Sorry for the long post. I've been struggling with this issue for about a year now in various forms and I don't know where else to turn for answers (Apple Store was of little assistance). This is the entire last 10 years of my family's memories so it's important to us. Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any assistance anyone can provide.

Leigh

iMac, macOS Sierra (10.12.6)

Posted on Nov 5, 2017 11:57 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

200,663 points

Nov 5, 2017 7:04 PM in response to lpramsden

1) Should a library of 54,100 photos be 222GB in size? I have seen other references online that have half the photos and the library is 20% of the size, etc. Does this ratio seem accurate or is something else going on?

It will depend on the pixel size of the individual photos, but my library has roughly 50000 photos and a size of 249.8 GB. So the size of your library is normal. My library is working fine. If others are having a much smaller library for the same amount of photos, they may be storing their photos as highly compressed jpegs or in a low quality.

2) Is there any benefit to running the repair utility again now that I have a "new" Mac? Or is the problem likely in the old library regardless of where it's stored?

I would only run a Repair, if photos cannot find some photos, albums vanish , or similar problems that indicate a library corruption. Never run a repair without making a backup before you run the repair. If a library is damaged, a repair can make the problem worse.

3) I plan on purchasing one of the de-duplicate utilities that exist as I know there are some older photos that are duplicates (and probably a number of HDR duplicates as well), and they should all be cleaned up.

You may try to use third-party applications to remove duplicates, but stay away from from any program that will modify the Photos Library directly and not just collect the duplicates in an album. The duplicate cleaners that modify the library can damage the library beyond repair. Apple is warning about duplicate cleaners:

Using third-party apps to remove duplicate photos might damage your Photos for macOS library - Apple Support

These applications are save:

Power Photos - it can exact duplicates or photos with the same filename or capture time, and is generally a great companion to Photos as a second browser
Photo Sweeper - It can detect edited versions of the same photo by comparing bitmaps and histograms
Duplicate Annihilator - it ca detect exact duplicate files.

4) What is the best course of action for managing a large Photos library? Would using Aperature (as opposed to Photos) help?

Aperture is great, but no longer sold. And Photos should be able to cope with even larger libraries than you are using now.

If you want to split your library, it will make it easier to backup the library and copy it to other drives, but make it harder to use your photos, because you would have to switch between libraries. You can only have one library open at a time and searching across libraries is not possible.

The slowness you are noticing may be caused by the small RAM. 4GB of RAM is not much for working with large media files. Can your iMac be upgraded to more RAM?

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

200,663 points

Nov 5, 2017 11:29 PM in response to lpramsden

1) Based on your answers, I do wonder if my original library is corrupted (i.e. since the "repaired" version had missing photos in it).

Repairing is a two-sided sword. If a repair succeeds, the repaired library will be working better. But if the library had been badly damaged, some items may be missing completely after the repair, if they cannot be repaired. And if you are using iCloud Photo Library, repairing the library will cause a new upload to iCloud. That can take several days for a library like yours and it will temporarily require twice the size of the library in iCloud. So you may even need to increase the iCloud storage plan.

Are you using iCloud Photo Library? It might account for missing albums, if you are using iCloud Photo Library on iPhones or iPads and a Mac. After a system upgrade I am regularly missing albums on my Mac.

Is the system version in your profile signature still valid? macOS 10.12.6 Sierra? If you already upgraded to High Sierra, some albums may be empty because hidden photos do no longer show in albums.

You moved the library to a new Mac, right? if you created a new user account on the new Mac, there may be file ownership problems for the library and repairing would be useful, even if the library will need to upload to iCloud again.

3) Reading between the lines, your suggestion would be that our setup should be able to handle a library of this size (or larger) and as such, we shouldn't bother splitting the library. Is that an accurate conclusion to reach?

You only need to split the library, if it is too large for the drive.A library needs more storage on the drive than the size of the library, if it needs to be upgraded or repaired. If there is not at least a quarter if the size of the library of free storage on the drive, I move the library to a larger drive or start a new library on a new drive.

It is perfectly fine to keep separate libraries for different purposes. If you have sets of photos, that will never be used together, for example photos for work and private photos. Or, if you have a portable Mac, you could keep a library with only the favorite photos on the system drive and a large archive library with all photos on the external drive.

But I try to keep all photos that I may need to access together in a slideshow or a book in one library, from all years. For example, if I want to make a special present for a person I may want to use the childhood photos as well as the current photos. Or if I am searching for a photo showing a sunset or a lion, I want o be able to search all photos at once and not have to open one yearly library after the other.

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Answer 3

lpramsden Author

Level 1

8 points

Nov 5, 2017 12:12 PM in response to lpramsden

Just a small update - I have closed Photos and reopened it now; opening takes about 45-60 seconds but once open, appears to be working fine.

I'm just worried however that the library is corrupted, or something, and needs to be managed...

Thanks again,

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Answer 4

lpramsden Author

Level 1

8 points

Nov 5, 2017 1:00 PM in response to léonie

Thanks a lot Leonie. Very helpful. Thanks for validating the library size being reasonable. We generally take "medium" res photos at a minimum, but my wife loves the Live Photos which are stored as mini videos as I understand, so compared to yours it does make some sense.

A couple follow ons:

1) Based on your answers, I do wonder if my original library is corrupted (i.e. since the "repaired" version had missing photos in it). Also - my wife had made a couple new albums recently and now there are no photos in them (and I know the photos are still there as I can see them in the all photos view). Is there any way to tell if a library is corrupted, and if so, how would one repair it?

2) Thanks for the tip on the de-dupe software. I'll review everything before doing this. I was planning on photosweeper so as long as it's safe, we will go that route.

3) Reading between the lines, your suggestion would be that our setup should be able to handle a library of this size (or larger) and as such, we shouldn't bother splitting the library. Is that an accurate conclusion to reach?

Thanks again so much for your assistance.

Leigh

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Answer 5

emba129

Level 1

4 points

Jan 1, 2018 5:16 PM in response to lpramsden

Hi Leigh

I’m in the same boat as you. I have about the same number of pictures and file size in my Photos library. I am struggling on what to do. I have the same machine as you from late 2011. I started breaking the large file into smaller photo libraries by year. It’s very tedious and I’m not sure how useful it will be finding photos from the past. I’d like to chat with you and share ideas. I’ve been to the Apple Store as well and they really didn’t offer anything I’ve considered.

The cloud is interesting but the limit is WiFi speed. With a huge file sizes we have with our primary photo library I’m concerend we will take a step back at trying to access this large file in the cloud.

If you would like to chat send me an email to emba129_98@yahoo.com. We can try to figure it out together.

Chris

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