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"Photos Library" Masters folder only showing photos 3 years back

In preparation for my new, lower storage Macbook arriving on Thurs, I'm trying to minimize the size of my photos library, which is currently showing to be 271 GB. I figured I would go into the masters folder to sort by size and try to delete the biggest files, but when I went into the masters folder I noticed the only folders were 2017, 2016, and 2015. But in the photos app itself, I have photos going back many years before. Where are these in my masters folder? How do I find these photos in finder?

MacBook Pro, macOS Sierra (10.12.6)

Posted on Dec 26, 2017 9:01 PM

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Posted on Dec 29, 2017 12:02 PM

I noticed the only folders were 2017, 2016, and 2015.

That is normal. The Masters folder organized by the date of import, not by the date the photos have been taken. And if a library is upgraded to a new version of Photos or repaired, the Masters folder may get rearranged and all oder photos moved to the same yearly folder. And if you are using iCloud Photo Library, the older photos may not be stored in the Masters folder at all, but only in iCloud.

The Masters folder is meant to be read by Photos, but it is not useable as a user interface.


In addition to the AppleScript that Larry pointed to, you can use PowerPhotos to find large image files. The free trial version of PowerPhotos can help you to see the file size of the photos in your Photos library in a more convenient way. You can sort the photos by file size in list view - just use the column view in PowerPhotos and add the Size column like this:


User uploaded file

Then click the Size column to sort by the file size.


When I do that, I can see that the largest files are images I edited in an external editor, that returned a gigantic jPEG file. external editors will create very large JPEGs as an additional quasi-master, and these files may not appear in your Masters folder, but in the folder Resources in the Photos Library.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 29, 2017 12:02 PM in response to allyson1124

I noticed the only folders were 2017, 2016, and 2015.

That is normal. The Masters folder organized by the date of import, not by the date the photos have been taken. And if a library is upgraded to a new version of Photos or repaired, the Masters folder may get rearranged and all oder photos moved to the same yearly folder. And if you are using iCloud Photo Library, the older photos may not be stored in the Masters folder at all, but only in iCloud.

The Masters folder is meant to be read by Photos, but it is not useable as a user interface.


In addition to the AppleScript that Larry pointed to, you can use PowerPhotos to find large image files. The free trial version of PowerPhotos can help you to see the file size of the photos in your Photos library in a more convenient way. You can sort the photos by file size in list view - just use the column view in PowerPhotos and add the Size column like this:


User uploaded file

Then click the Size column to sort by the file size.


When I do that, I can see that the largest files are images I edited in an external editor, that returned a gigantic jPEG file. external editors will create very large JPEGs as an additional quasi-master, and these files may not appear in your Masters folder, but in the folder Resources in the Photos Library.

Dec 29, 2017 12:02 PM in response to allyson1124

You should never go directly into the contents of the Photos library and if you make any changes of any sort to the library using the finder you will destroy your Photos library and render it unusable - here is a user script that can assist you in doing this correctly without damaging yoru library- : Script: How to find videos and photos in your Photos Library larger or smaller than a given file size


LN

Dec 27, 2017 10:36 PM in response to LarryHN

I didn't know that using finder for my photos library isn't a good idea, so thank you for that information. I ended up doing "get info" for all the videos in my library and taking out the largest ones. After doing that and clearing my "recently deleted" folder, my photos library is still showing to be 271 GB. I know I deleted about 100 GB of videos, so how can this be?

"Photos Library" Masters folder only showing photos 3 years back

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