iMac Photos space issue

[Marli]

When I look at store the iMac shows a lot being taken up by Photos. But my photo library is on an external USB3 drive. The Photo library on the Fusion Drive is only around 5 meg, when the remote drive Photo library is 182 gig.

Why are they taking space on a drive they do not reside on? and the drive they reside on does not appear to show them?

 

[webbga]

I am not sure how you are setup , but i recently encountered a problem similar to this. My one terabyte hard drive was almost filled and I could not figure out why. I have a lot of photos in Photos and LR, but not enough to take up a terabyte. I back up to Time Machine regularly and it was filling up as well. Turns out the problem was that the system was backing up Photos to the hard drive automatically once a week. This was a left over backup program from pre Cloud days that I must have transferred over to the MAC when I set it up. I deleted almost 450 gigabytes of backups and then deleted the backup folder. It freed up a ton of space. My photos are backed up on my external hard drive and to the cloud. this backup was not necessary and only a carryover. Check your Applications folder and see if you have a Backup folder.

 

[Starfia]

Are you using Photo Stream in the Photos app? I think I remember reading that actual data is stored somewhere in the boot disk's Library folder.

 

[Marli]

I do have Photo stream turned on, but there isnt 180 gig in that folder, unless it stores all of the photos and only shows some.

 

[Sohappy]

I do have Photo stream turned on, but there isnt 180 gig in that folder, unless it stores all of the photos and only shows some.

Did you find what was wrong ?

 

[Marli]

Nope, I still have a big chunk on photo data and I have looked in all the folders, hidden as well. and cant find it. only thing I can think of is that its been reported incorrectly.

 

[Weaselboy]

Nope, I still have a big chunk on photo data and I have looked in all the folders, hidden as well. and cant find it. only thing I can think of is that its been reported incorrectly.

Try reindexing Spotlight by running the command below in Terminal. Give it 30 minutes or so to complete.

What happens sometimes is that readout gets its info from the Spotlight index, and if that index is corrupt it will show everything incorrectly there.

sudo mdutil -E /