Apple Photos keeps filling SSDs on my MacBooks

[tb88]

Hi!

I'm Tomasz from Warsaw, Poland. Aerospace engineer turned software developer. Lurker since 2015, but this is my first post.

I struggled with this for years and finally curiosity won, hence me sharing this here... Do you have any idea how to stop Apple Photos from filling up SSD? I used 2014 MBP15 together with my wife, and her extensive 1.2 TB photo/video library kept on filling 256 GB SSD, leaving about 5-15 GB of free space, sometimes slowing things down. I read a lot about it, but couldn't find any way to make it work as great as on iPhone / iPad or at least manually set a cap at, for example, 30GB...

Last August I got a great deal on pristine 2015 MBP13. It was empty, and as soon as I logged my wife to iCloud and opened Photos ("optimizing Mac storage" turned on, obviously, as on MBP15), the machine started to work hard on filling it up with photos and videos. This time it went as far as leaving only 1.5 GB of free space, making it barely usable.

It was bad, so I disconnected local libraries from iCloud and finally deleted them, limiting my contacts with Apple Photos to the places where it works great: iPhone, iPad, and sporadically iCloud website.

Does anyone have similar experience? Is there any way to make it work flawlessy on a Mac with 256 GB SSD?

Thanks,
Tomasz

 

[lordhamster]

Hi!

I'm Tomasz from Warsaw, Poland. Aerospace engineer turned software developer. Lurker since 2015, but this is my first post.

I struggled with this for years and finally curiosity won, hence me sharing this here... Do you have any idea how to stop Apple Photos from filling up SSD? I used 2014 MBP15 together with my wife, and her extensive 1.2 TB photo/video library kept on filling 256 GB SSD, leaving about 5-15 GB of free space, sometimes slowing things down. I read a lot about it, but couldn't find any way to make it work as great as on iPhone / iPad or at least manually set a cap at, for example, 30GB...

Last August I got a great deal on pristine 2015 MBP13. It was empty, and as soon as I logged my wife to iCloud and opened Photos ("optimizing Mac storage" turned on, obviously, as on MBP15), the machine started to work hard on filling it up with photos and videos. This time it went as far as leaving only 1.5 GB of free space, making it barely usable.

It was bad, so I disconnected local libraries from iCloud and finally deleted them, limiting my contacts with Apple Photos to the places where it works great: iPhone, iPad, and sporadically iCloud website.

Does anyone have similar experience? Is there any way to make it work flawlessy on a Mac with 256 GB SSD?

Thanks,
Tomasz

I'm interested in this as well as I'm busy migrating from Google Photos to Apple Photos. The "Optimize Mac Storage" option isn't working nearly as well on my Mac as it does on the iOS devices.

 

[chabig]

Tomasz, because it behaves the same way on both machines, I suspect that even with optimized storage turned on, the low resolution proxies of such a large library occupy more than 256GB. Because the library is so large, perhaps the best way to manage is to keep your Photos library on external media. You can instruct Photos to keep the system library on external media by holding down the option key when you launch the app.

Create additional photo libraries in Photos on Mac

In Photos on your Mac, create new photo libraries, switch between libraries, and designate a library as the System Photo Library.

support.apple.com