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Hi,
After turning on iCloud for Photo in my Mac, its actually download all the optimised photo from iCloud to my local disk. Even I turn off the iCloud, and select not to download the photos to my Mac, seems I still have those pictures optimised and occupying my local disk.
May I know if the only solution is to deleted all the optimised photo manually in order to free those memory again?
Thanks. Any help is appreciated.
Are all your Photos in iCloud by now? Check on your iCloud web page www.icloud.com in the Photos.app there, if all photos you are seeing locally on your Mac are also in iCloud. If all photos have been safely uploaded, you can free the local storage completely by starting over with a new, empty Photos Library. If you make a new, empty library your Photos Library, initially, all photos will start as optimised versions. The optimised versions will roughly side 10% to 20% of the size of the full versions. It will depend on the format and size of the originals, how much storage an optimised library will need. See: How to force Photos for Mac to Optimise the Storage Immediately
I would not let the iCloud Library grow larger than you can afford locally as "optimised". Photos will be painfully slow, if all photos need to be optimised. Usually Photos will try to keep a working set of recently used items at the full resolution. This will not be possible, if you have so many items in iCloud, that all local storage is used by the optimised versions.
Are all your Photos in iCloud by now? Check on your iCloud web page www.icloud.com in the Photos.app there, if all photos you are seeing locally on your Mac are also in iCloud. If all photos have been safely uploaded, you can free the local storage completely by starting over with a new, empty Photos Library. If you make a new, empty library your Photos Library, initially, all photos will start as optimised versions. The optimised versions will roughly side 10% to 20% of the size of the full versions. It will depend on the format and size of the originals, how much storage an optimised library will need. See: How to force Photos for Mac to Optimise the Storage Immediately
I would not let the iCloud Library grow larger than you can afford locally as "optimised". Photos will be painfully slow, if all photos need to be optimised. Usually Photos will try to keep a working set of recently used items at the full resolution. This will not be possible, if you have so many items in iCloud, that all local storage is used by the optimised versions.
Hello Danee2006,
It sounds like photos and videos were downloaded to your Mac from iCloud, and you want to know how to remove them, correct? We'd love to provide some information.
Just to confirm, do you recall if you selected the option to download originals when you turned on Optimize Storage?
"If you have Optimize Storage turned on, you might not have all of your original photos and videos on your device. To download the original photos and videos on your iOS device, go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Photos and select Download and Keep Originals. On your Mac, open Photos, choose Photos > Preferences, then select Download Originals to this Mac. Then you can turn off iCloud Photos. You can also select the photos and videos that you want to download from iCloud.com.
Before you turn off iCloud Photos, you might want to make a copy of your photos and videos." You can find more information about how to manage iCloud Photos here: Get help with iCloud Photos
If you want to delete photos from iCloud on your Mac, please check out this page: Delete photos from iCloud using Photos on Mac
Take care!
Hello Brittany,
Thanks a lot for the help.
I turned on Optimize Storage, so the photo on my Mac now is indeed 5000+ low resolution photos. When I turned off iCloud, it prompt me whether I want to remove the photo from my Mac, and selected "remove". The size of the storage did restore a bit, however, it still much less than the storage I have before connecting to iCloud. Properly, those are the space taken up by the low resolution photo, which I can still find them when I open Photos.
Thanks for any direction in advance.
Hi léonie,
Thanks a lot for the help. Do you have any suggestion for photo storage? Recently, I have just bought a 4T external disk and thinking to backup the files from iClouds. Since i am using a family plan, there are a lot photos there.
I am thinking maybe I should move the photo library on my Mac to the external disk, then turn on iCloud to download the photos in original size. By doing this, my Mac photo no longer located in my laptop.
Or should it be better to export all the iCloud photo to the external disk while the library still locate on laptop. But then the backup will need to be done manually everytime.. (And i am not sure i have to export all the photos again next time, or iCloud can detect which photo have been export already.)
Thanks
iCloud photo decrease my local disk space
