Photos Library - which file size is right

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Photos Library - which file size is right

Clicking on INFO in the white space of my Photos Library, I get the box below (left) showing that my library contains over 41,000 photos and nearly 1000 videos and has a file size of 118.7 GB.

Clicking on GET INFO for the Photos Library within the Pictures folder in Finder, however, yields the indication that the same file (right?) is 151.5 GB, i.e. 32.8 GB larger than the Photos app tells me.

I have been investing quite some time to compress videos and to clean out the library, and these reductions are properly reflected (ie, the file rise reported in Finder is indeed declining as I proceed). But why this massive discrepancy ?

Posted on Aug 17, 2018 9:47 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

200,915 points

Aug 18, 2018 2:43 AM in response to Remise

The size you are seeing in Photos in the Info for the Photos tab is the size of the Photos and videos, when you export them from Photos. It is approximately the combined size of all photos and videos that are not hidden.

But when you are looking at the size of the library in the Finder, you will see the combined size of all items in the Photos Library. This will include working copy sof the photos (thumnails and previews of the edited versions and the faces, and database files, also sandbox folders used by the background processes. The size of the library can be considerably larger than the combines size of the original image files. Only Mac the additional items in the library have a size of 25% of the size of the original image files.

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Answer 2

Remise Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 18, 2018 2:50 AM in response to léonie

Leonie thank you.

This explains the difference. Do you share my feeling that 25% is a very heavy overhead for the management of the Photos Library? 33 GB "overhead" for 42,000 items = 785 KB of "overhead" on average per item in the database ... when the average file size of the photos is 1-2 MB. Or if the overhead is in proportion to file size, then 16 GB overhead for 41,000 photos = almost 400 KB per photo ... and 17 GB for the 1000 videos = 17 MB of overhead per video (average).

Any way you look at it, this is outrageous waste of storage space. I routinely remove the caches with CleanMyMac3, so it cannot be those.

Any way to attack this space-wasting Photos overhead?

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Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

200,915 points

Aug 18, 2018 3:36 AM in response to Remise

I routinely remove the caches with CleanMyMac3, so it cannot be those.

By careful with CleanMyMac 3. I have tested it on a test library and had afterward a lot of broken links. I would not let it touch my library. Photos could no longer find the originals for many photos and I had to restore the library from a backup.

Yes, Photos is keeping a lot of working copies, but for a good purpose. All photo applications by Apple are supporting a lossless workflow (Aperture, iPhoto, Photos). If you edit a photo you can revert it to the original version, each adjustment individually. The original image file is always preserved as it is, so we do not have to manage the originals on or own. And the thumbnails are created to make the browsing faster and to make the photos available to other applications in the media browser. I am willing to sacrifice the extra 25% space for cached data to have a faster and more responsive Mac. Without the extra thumbnails for browsing it would be a pain to switch between albums, because photos would have to create the thumbnails on demand and I would be always seeing the beach ball spinning. For a large library this would be horribly slow.

If you do not like the lossless workflow, you would be better off by managing the photos yourself in folders in the Finder.

I am only keeping my smaller library with the favorites and the most recent projects on my system drive and the archive with all photos on an external drive. And I only clean caches, if something is crashing and I suspect corrupted files in a cache. Then I remove the cache for the application that is having trouble. Otherwise I leave the caches alone. Clearing the caches will just force the app to waste time by recreating the cached content.

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Answer 4

Remise Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 18, 2018 8:08 AM in response to léonie

I am aware that Photos retains originals of all images. 99 times out of 100' I never go back to the originals once I have edited or modified an image. Therefore I consider that retaining all that history is a waste and I would gladly activate an option to discard the history and retain only the modified version. Before Photos, CleanMyMac was able to enter iPhotos and remove all unnecessary versions and I used this function often and without any regrets. In Photos this is no longer possible. I have my entire library active and I reference it quite often, so I am not interested in off-loading it to an archive.

I hope Apple's developer team sees my comments and considers granting its users the power to delete photo history and save on the 25% overhead !

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Photos Library - which file size is right

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