How big is your Photos library?

I’ve been scanning negatives and my Photos library is expanding rapidly. I never thought I would ever have 40,000 photos (and frankly, I don’t know why I need 40,000 photos, but that’s another story). I’m sure this is nowhere near the top end but it made me curious. How big is your Photos library?

Interesting question - 15 years of digital photos and 70k. Some come from others when on vacation

I’m sitting at around 52k photos and 2.5k videos. The entire library is roughly 750GB. I need to cull some of it down but just haven’t had the motivation yet.

I have just over 23,000 photos and almost 800 videos and my library currently takes up over 200 GB of disk space. There’s definitely some trimming to be done. With some work, I’m guessing I could reduce the size by half (or even more).

My “active” library is 80GB – images from the recent 8 years or so. My “inactive” archive is another 70GB – images on the NAS that age back from digital images created 9+ years ago, to scans of images made by others in the family in the mid-1800s. I have no idea what my total image count is.

I recently started working with a Z7 and am making plans to add storage for its libraries. Images range upward from 15MB each.

Oooh! I’ve been eyeing that camera. But for the longest time I’ve been thinking about and researching tabletop photography, and the 96-187MP stitched RAW files in High Res mode in the new Panasonic S cameras have got me awaiting more reviews.

Personal files only: (I also have a bunch of Historical Society files I am working on)
Currently cataloged in Lightroom ~24K images 104GB of data
Film formats in process waiting for scanning and inclusion ~40,000 images
Digital files waiting for inclusion and cataloging unknown numbers but 116GB of files

I have mine, my husband’s, my mother’s and my father’s film archives. My stepdad has another large archive also being included but not positive of numbers although over 10K images for sure and I suspect about 25K total.

Historical society has tens of thousands of film negatives, 1500 glass plate negatives, 150 large format scrapbooks of approx 150 pages each, and an unknown number of prints for which no negative exists. My best guestimate is that the entire collection when finally scanned will be something around 10 terabytes of data. I could be off by orders of magnitude as I haven’t dealt with much more than the scrapbooks and the glass plates.

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I thought my 12,000 pictures and videos were a big deal…but after reading this I have some room to grow.

For those with large libraries and using iCloud photo sync, have you run into a ceiling where things start to get flakey?

Mine is 55GB. I’m thinking of turning on Optimize and moving some to iCloud, but I’m a little afraid. I still have them on my iMP, and many backups, but still…

That’s kinda where I was gonna go next.

I’ve successfully used PowerPhotos to split my library and offload older photos.

https://fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

I used to assist one of my executives with his wife’s iMac. Her library was around 450GB the last time I worked on the computer.

His work iMac and her home iMac were synced to the same iCloud account so when I backed up his computer at the office, her photos were protected - long story.

Photos worked as expected, but his iMac was almost unusable for about 30 minutes every time it was started. Syncing was very slow and we had 1GB (up & down) circuit.

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10k photos which includes some scanned old pix. I try to cull the bad photos. That’s just my library. My wife has many more since she doesn’t delete as many as I do.

Mine is 360GB. From memory that is about 40k photos and 1k videos.

My photos reside on my Mac, but are synced to iCloud. The iCloud sync and optimise was terrible when it first came out and I lost quite a few photos and videos because of that. Nowadays the sync (but I don’t use optimise anymore) has been rock solid.

I only have a 16GB iPhone, so I don’t link my library to my phone, as optimise really doesn’t work very well, and never has.

To view my photos on my iPhone, my Mac syncs with Google photos (also acts as a 4th last ditch backup) and this works well with not clogging up my iPhone storage. This also means my wife has remote access via her iPhone to our photos too.

42,000 photos; 1,100 videos. All in iCloud.

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11,000 photos, 900 Videos … 74gb ; and I thought I had too many :slight_smile:

I don’t use iCloud so can’t help there.

I don’t use iCloud either for my photos. I have no need for constant access to every one of my photos. If I did I probably would take advantage of Google Photos, not iCloud.

I use Photos.app exclusively to import my iPhone photos/videos, then delete them from the phone. I use Lightroom exclusively for my ‘real’ cameras. I back up everything locally on the Mac, and with BackBlaze.

In the future I could see myself using Lightroom CC on an iPad with Adobe’s cloud storage, but only as a temporary measure, then transferring files back to the Mac for permanent storage.

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12TB / 415,000+ photos, about 95% which are rated and geotagged.

Obviously not in iCloud, or any other cloud.

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28,000 files using around 121gb. I have started to take more in RAW these days so the disk space usage is going up!

Use Dropbox to store and Lightroom to manage plus various backups.