One of the more interesting features of Photos for Mac is its ability to not store my entire photo library on my Mac's drive.1 It does this by syncing the entire library to iCloud Photo Library2 and then dynamically loading and unloading photos as you use it.
The Photos app saves disk space on your Mac by displaying optimized JPEG versions of your RAW images. If you edit an optimized image on your Mac, Photos downloads the RAW file for that image. When Photos downloads a RAW image from iCloud Photos, it creates a new full-sized JPEG for optimal viewing on your Mac. This is easy and simple to compress image to 20kb online. You can easily compress all the images and save and compress image to 20kb online, free. This is an online tool that provides you to compress the images 20kb online as you want.
In true Apple fashion, Photos protects the user from thinking about managing storage — everything happens automatically, with absolutely no intervention from the user. That's as it should be, but a few optional controls for the control freaks among us wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
This thought occurred to me when I was fishing a file out of my Pictures folder and noticed that my Photos library takes up 46GB of my precious iMac SSD storage space.
That's a lot, especially when you're supposed to render an HD video in Final Cut Pro, but you can't because you're out of disk space. There's no button for me to press to put Photos in Austerity Mode, no interface to force it to slim down what it's using. In fact, there's no communication at all from the app about how it manages its own storage space.
Plumbing the depths of the Internet, I found this pretty great post on StackExchange that charts the size of the Photos library and a Mac's disk usage. Photos is definitely optimizing the size of its library, though it's still not entirely clear to me whether it only does this when it's running, or if there's some background process that might do it all the time. (My guess is that it's the former.)
What that post does clarify is that Photos apparently has an optimization target: 10 percent of free disk space. So on my 467GB partition, it's trying to free up roughly 47GB of free space. (At the moment that drive has 42GB free, so I guess it's working?)
I'm also a little surprised at the 16GB of thumbnails in my Photos Library. That's 240K in thumbnail data for every one of my 67,782 photos. It turns out that the Photos library actually generates two thumbnail files for each image: one '1024' image (roughly in the ballpark of 1024-by-768 pixels, though it varies based on aspect ratio) that's 200K-300K, and a standard thumbnail that's more like 480-by-360 and 50K-75K.
I'm also a little surprised at the 16GB of thumbnails in my Photos Library. That's 240K in thumbnail data for every one of my 67,782 photos. It turns out that the Photos library actually generates two thumbnail files for each image: one '1024' image (roughly in the ballpark of 1024-by-768 pixels, though it varies based on aspect ratio) that's 200K-300K, and a standard thumbnail that's more like 480-by-360 and 50K-75K.
Those thumbnails are what make the Photos interface so pretty and responsive, even at Retina resolutions. At the same time… 135,000 thumbnail files on my SSD taking up 16GB of space. I guess that's the trade-off of having a huge cloud photo library, but… wow.
I'm so happy that this feature exists, but in a future update I'd love to see a bit more transparency about how the storage is being optimized, and perhaps even a user option to blow out the cache or reduce the library size by some amount. Or, failing that, it needs to be much more aggressive in pruning its library in low-disk situations.
- After all, my photo library is larger than my Mac's drive, so it just won't fit! I had to break my old iPhoto Library into pieces and store it on a server. ↩
- You can't use this feature if you aren't using iCloud Photo Library, because Photos needs a data source for the files it's deleting. ↩
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iCloud Photos keeps your photos and videos up to date on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac. If your photo library includes images in RAW format, you can view and edit them on your Mac or iPad.
About RAW files on your Mac
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The availability of RAW files on your Mac depends on a few conditions:
- If you have the Download Originals to this Mac option turned on in Photos (Photos > Preferences > iCloud > Download Originals to this Mac), then your RAW files are always present in Photos on your Mac.
- If you have the Optimize Mac Storage option turned on, then your RAW files are stored in iCloud Photos. The Photos app saves disk space on your Mac by displaying optimized JPEG versions of your RAW images. If you edit an optimized image on your Mac, Photos downloads the RAW file for that image.
- When Photos downloads a RAW image from iCloud Photos, it creates a new full-sized JPEG for optimal viewing on your Mac. It won't replace the RAW and embedded JPEG file already stored in iCloud. iOS devices will view the embedded JPEG.
- RAW files that you store outside the Photos app library (for example, in your Pictures folder) are always present on your Mac, but aren't stored in iCloud and won't stay up to date in the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
About RAW files imported to iPad with the Camera Connection Kit
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Fortnite free skins app. If you import RAW images to an iPad with the Camera Connection Kit, turn on Download Originals or edit the images on your Mac so that the files are available on your Mac in iCloud Photos.
