Images and videos eating up all the storage on your Mac?
With iCloud Photo Library you never have to worry about running out of space again. Thanks to "optimized storage", Apple can intelligently keep track of and manage your free space, ensuring your recent, favorite, and frequently accessed images and videos are immediately available on your device, while your older, less frequently accessed one are kept safely off your device and up on Apple's servers, just a download away. It's not magic, but if you're tight on space, it'll absolutely feel that way.
Best of all, "optimize storage" really is "set it and forget it". Once you turn it on, you can turn off that part of your brain that worried about how many photos and videos you could store on your Mac. The part that constantly stressed you'd run out, or need to delete older content to make way for new.
From now on it'll just work, so all you have to do is just shoot!
How to turn on optimize storage on your Mac
If you only have one Mac and it has a ton of storage, you may not need to worry about "optimize storage". If you have a MacBook you use for travel, or don't have a lot of storage, you'll also want to consider turning on "optimize storage" to save space and keep an online backup.
- Launch Photos for OS X on your Mac
- Go to the Photos > Preferences menu (or type Command + ,)
- Click on the iCloud tab
- Click on Optimize Mac Storage

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Reader comments
How to save space on your Mac with 'optimized storage' and iCloud Photo Library
The problem I have encountered with the "optimized storage" option is if your ever in a area with bad coverage all you get is low res thumbnails as it tries to "download" the original if you try to view it. I have at times tried to show a video and it just hangs as it tries to download it. At this point my next iPhone will be at least the 64gb so I can keep original photos/videos on my phone.
Sent from the iMore App
The problem with this is I can't even fit my Photos library onto my MBP's local hard drive, it lives on a external hard drive. In order fit my library locally, I would need to force an optimization on my external drive, which has plenty of space, before I could move the library to my laptop, and I don't think this is possible. The solution would be to let your photos library live in a different place that your media (ala iTunes), so that I could open the library without my external HD plugged in, and it would connect to the optimized media and the cloud. Then when I'm get home, I could connect my external hard drive and open the library, and it would automatically connect to the high res files. FCPX now has a pretty decent proxy workflow that does exactly this (sans cloud storage). That team needs to talk to the Photos team.
I have a question regarding this 'optimized storage' option. I have about 200GB of photos / videos stored on a NAS drive, I also have a MacBook Air with about 120GB free on it, if I import say 100GB of photos/vids into the new Photos App (currently empty), enable the iCloud sync with 'optimized storage' selected will my Mac automagically reduce some of my high-res locally stored pics/vids with lo-res versions to make sure I have some free hard drive space? If yes then can I repeat this process to import the other 100GB from the NAS drive until it's all been imported, uploaded to iCloud and locally downsized?
Or.... If it's not that smart can anyone suggest a workflow that works? (I don't have any other Macs - if I did I might have tried syncing into iCloud from there and trusting iCloud to sync the lo-res copies back to my MBA).
Thanks, Pete
Hi Pete
Thought I'd reply to your questions as I had the same situation when I set this up a few months ago. (I'm on the beta program) Perhaps you've already got what you're looking for. Im here because of my new issue. (See below, before you move ahead)
Like yourself, I have a massive photo library, about 15 years worth of pics. It totals 110Gig. Up until the new Photos app, I kept this on an external HDD as it's to big to fit on my MachBook with other pics.
The process to import this into the new Photos app should look a little something like this.
- First make sure you have signed up to a new iCloud Storage Plan enough for all your pics. I my case I now have a 200Gig Subscription.
- Make sure your external drive (NAS or what ever) has double the space free of your current photo library size. You need this because when the existing photos library gets converted, it actually creates a new Photos Library File in the same location and converts all your data.
- Upgrade your Mac to the new Photos app.
- Launch the existing iPhoto's library from existing location. (external HDD/NAS) You can just browse to the library file and fire it up. When the new Photo's app launches it will talk you through the migration process. If it doesn't launch with the new app, you can right click on it and select open with "Photos"
- Once everything is done, and you can run the new Photos app (from the external HDD library file) you will notice under the System Preferences, is an uploader which will give you the status of your upload to iCloud. This could take ages. On my slow broadband it took a week!! I was literally walking around with my external hdd hanging off my laptop.
- Once everything is uploaded, disconnect the external drive.
- Uninstall old iPhoto if it's still on your machine
- Delete any old local iPhoto library files on laptop (Finder/User/Photos/...)
- Reboot
- Launch the new Photo's app (this will create a new local Photos library on laptop)
- Go into setting and switch on Optimization
- Enable iCloud photo syncing in System setting again
- Restart Photo's app
If you have 2 external storage locations, I assume you have 2 different iPhoto collections. You just need to repeat the process, Migrate both, upload both, then switch on the service on your laptop.
That's about it. It will start 'downloading all the images to your laptop again but the optimised versions. Works well.
My new problem is: Even with optimisation switched on, on my iPhone, a 110Gig photo library creates 4.5gigs of thumbnails on my iPhone! So as a result, my phone is now full and there seems to be nothing I can do about it. Other than, disabling the new Photo's app on my iPhone. Sucks. I've raised this with apple, but haven't heard anything yet. If you've gone ahead with your setup and came across same issue please let me know!
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If I use the optimize function I would only have iCloud as my backup for full quality images and videos? My Time Machine would only be backing up my "optimized" images and videos. This would leave me with no genuine back up. Might be good if Apple had a setting for Time Machine to sync with iCloud instead of my Mac's Library to have a second copy just in case.
I tried to "optimize storage space" but when I get to step 3, the bar shown never shows any activity; it does not turn blue, it just sits there gray. I tried pressing delay a day, no change. Photos are present in iCloud, but Photos app is still about 10G and I thought the size would be reduced. In System Preferences>iCloud>Photos when I click options, it freezes, never opens--not just System Preferences freeze, but Safari freezes too until I force quit Photos options. So IS Photos on my MacBook Air already "optimized"? Why can't I check Photos options in System Prefs?
It seems that iCloud Photo library is a simple service for simple use. I think it was not designed 100gb photo libraries in mind. It works perfectly when iPhone/iPad is your main camera.
I decided to use it for mobile photos only. I kept my old library (15 years of photos) in usb drive and made new one for iCloud. I have Crashplan backups of my old library so I don't need iCloud for that. I also use Lightroom, so that library does not get new pics.
Having a several differenent systems can be messy. But there's not a universal solution for all at least I think so.
But what does it mean? I still can't get my head around it. So I have a Macbook Air 128gb, and 3 million photos, so Apple makes 2,999,999 low res images and choose one random photo to be high res because I have only enough space for one big-res image? I don't know which one it is, it doesn't affect the viewing via the Photos App, but, thankfully out of all the images in iCloud Apple's intelligent wizardry has picked that photo of my dog with its head stuck in the toilet as the one high-res image on my computer?
What if I have an 80gb file that I need to copy onto my machine. I plug in a USB drive, then what? Apple is intelligently converting half my high-res images into thumbnails while the file is copying over? What if I'm not connected to the internet? What happens then?
Why can't I just have a checkbox. Make all images thumbnails?
The problem for me seems to be that the "optimize" setting has no intelligence with large libraries stored on smaller laptop disks. My 120GB+ iCloud library seems to go on downloading until it fills up all the remaining 50+GB of space on my MacBook (happily using up space and bandwidth like there is no tomorrow!)
They may well be "optimized" pictures, but it certainly seems like it tries to download all of them and store them whatever you do... (In my experiment, after 3 days of being left to download a new connection to my iCloud library, it had filled up all but 1GB on the drive - and was saying it had no more room to store optimised photos).
This is just crazy!
Why not at the very least operate like iOS devices and download a core bunch of thumbnails and previews and leave plenty of space? Does Apple think we don't need any space at all for anything else? It's almost beyond belief that the "optimize" setting is just so "dumb"... and it really does shake your trust in the competency and scenarios the iCloud Photos team are testing.
Optimized library takes up 2.5gb of 16gb iPhone. Which is 2.4gb more than i would like. I guess this is done to encourage upgrading 32gb for extra $100 ($96 profit). Just let me access photos from cloud which i pay monthly for?
I'm testing this out as well on a MBP w/512GB drive. I've added about 8GB of pictures, and every single picture is in it's native form so far. I have 270GB free on my drive, but at what point does the app begin to "optimize" the locally store photos? Maybe after they've sat on the drive for a certain amount to time they'll start begin optimized? I have no idea. I'd like to be able to set it to optimize any photo over a certain age. Anything. I'm afraid this thing isn't going to scale well either. I really want this to work!
Thanks for the article. Here is my feedback from using the service.
As a trial I have uploaded all my 50Gb (checked with OmniDiskSweep) of photo's to the iCloud Photo Library. I too notice that Optimise Mac Storage doesn't seem to do anything... I would of imagined some sort of slider where I can decide the size of data to cache on my local disk. I still have the same amount of space taken up.
Maybe its a good thing to also set the checkbox for Download originals to at least one of your laptops so that you can take a backup of what is in the cloud. Yes, Apple doesn't guarantee that your photo's in the cloud will be safe. Check the https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT204264 sub heading at the bottom "Do I need a Backup". Frankly I am a bit surprised with this as cloud company's such as Amazon can replicate you data in more than one place in the event of one location going up in smoke at least you have another backup in the cloud. You can't guarantee that if something goes wrong in iCloud that the checked Download originals option will not corrupt your local copy of the originals. There are no details as to the sophistication level of this option.
As I don't really review my photo library on other Mac computers nor my iOS devices but it is a nice feature... which might be a reason to use the iCloud Photo Library, I am deciding whether to ditch this service and instead just use Amazon S3 or BitSync. I stopped using TimeMachine since it corrupted itself twice when I needed it the most. Thankfully I used SuperDuper to clone my hard drive.
When reviewing past photos on my iPhone 6 using wifi on a (120Mb cable network) there is a noticeable lag downloading the collection thumbnails and when I press on one of the photos another lag as it uploads the hi-res. I have to admit that it is nice to look back in time at past photos right. Reminder: I need to check how I review photos with my AppleTV.
It would be great if I could just upload photos to the cloud, have it replicated in more than one place and have access to those photos from a variety of devices and applications. That way it would be open. I like using iMovie and Photo but they are not the end of the world.... we all use different applications which take the original and generate their own formats.
So in summary I am paying $1 a month to be able to access my entire photo library on the road so to speak provided I have either wifi or 4G/LTE. It has not reduced the amount of disk space I need. I still need local storage for my originals and I need to backup everything at least once at home and maybe store another backup somewhere else.
I have a macbook with little storage, wich is bad because i take lots of pictures in " raw", so the photos app is already over capacity (like 60 gb). So, i bought 200 Gb space on Icloud. When looking at the finder Icloud setings, it says i have 196 gb avaiable on icloud(well, makes sense). But i tried many times and cannot use to download my photos. When i put at the icloud photo library settings o the app, and mark the " optimize mac storage" , it says that my Mac storage is full. I know. Thats why i bought the clod space. I dont get it. Somone could help me out? thanks....