Reducing a massive iCloud photo library?

[primarycolors]

Hey guys:
Please hold your judgements, but my iCloud Photo Library is way, way too big. It has filled up 1TB of space with 120,000 photos.

I worry this is way too much for me to pare down photo-by-photo, but many of these photos are memories I can’t just wipe out.

Are there any suggestions of apps (that don't also totally invade privacy) that can help make this process easier?

Thanks in advance.

 

[RhetTbull]

An often overlooked feature of Photos is that it can work with more than one photo library (though only one library can be designated the "System library" and only that one can sync to iCloud). One option is to move some of the photos to one or more external libraries (perhaps by year) so you can access them in Photos when needed but they don't clog your primary library. The commercial app PowerPhotos is useful for managing this process and it can copy/move photos from one library to another so you don't lose metadata (such as keywords) or organization (such as folders/albums).

 

[Iwavvns]

This sounds like it would benefit from being made a week-long project, with plenty of breaks so you don’t lose focus. Possibly break it down into 2 groups; major group and minor group, with the minor group being offloaded to external storage to free up iCloud space. What goes into each group is up to you, of course, but this would help pare down the library without actually losing any of your memories. Also, remove any “duplicates” - an example would be the same shot of my cat from three different angles, I would just delete two of those photos.

 

[djs71a]

Another longer term option is to look at photos taken the current day of the year. This will take a year, but each day search for the current month / day without the year. For example "January 6". It should show you all photos taken in Jan 6 regardless of year. It just takes a couple minutes per day.