How to "audit" one's Photos Library? Analysis-paralysis on what to do next, is happening big-time here!

Tech Support
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Hope someone can give me some suggestions.

Still have a trusty 2012 Mac Mini that is connected to a 34" tv in a spare room, that serves as a kind of media centre.
It has an internal 1 TB SSD (with 644GB’s available), and a secondary 1TB HDD — that now has no space available on it.
The SSD has the OS running on it, and the Music.app.

The “culprit” on the HDD, are my and my SO’s Photo’s libraries.
Her library (that the HDD is pointed to, and accesses from her user account) comes in at 286GB, and mine comes in at 645GB.

With the HDD now full, I am unable to open Photos, to check and see if all going OK — and obviously, nothing more can be synced/downloaded.

Importantly — both library’s were set to “download Originals” — with the thinking that both my and my wife’s Photo’s library would be backed up to the Mac Mini, which then has Backblaze and a DAS external storage/TM backup connected to it, for some redundancy.

My questions:
1.) Whilst I acknowledge that photos and videos have increased in size over the years, given the new resolutions involved — I cannot for the life of me see how my library has ballooned to over 600GB’s in a couple of years.
I am now wondering (as per this post) whether my aim of having the originals download for both user accounts, despite not always being logged in etc., has seen the Photo libraries balloon beyond the size they are supposed to be, on account of Photos.app possibly downloading multiple versions/duplicates, in efforts to keep the library’s properly synced?

That said, my iPhone also indicates that my Photos’ library is the same size indicated on the Mac Mini…
But goodness — I don’t take photos at a Siracusa level — family of 4, and it’s only iPhone photos, and the occasional 1/2/3 minute videos of concerts/sports events etc. Nothing out of the ordinary. Is that possible, to have increased 3-fold over a few years?

Regardless, (2.) not sure what to do now?
How would I check to see that the Photos’ DB is “correct”, and not containing unnecessary duplicates?
Should I (2.a) copy/move the biggest one off onto an external, to free up HDD space — and then “rebuild” my wife’s library? Once that’s done, then (2.b) “rebuild/repair” my library on the external, to see if it reduces size, to then hopefully copy back?

Or do I concede that the bloat is real, and (3) invest in bigger external drives for my aging DAS, and move things over to external storage?

Really stuck ATM, and would like to resolve this ASAP, to ensure nothing gets lost.
Would appreciate any/all suggestions!

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Firstly, I’d look at your camera settings for videos on your iPhone (i assume), if these are set to the maximums this can easily and quickly chew through space, also check if you’re shooting ProRes

Also what is your Camera app set to for photos, again if it’s ProRaw, it’ll quickly eat up space.

If you do a lot of editing of photos, the Photos app will retain the originals and the edited versions.

Finally, if you and your SO have an Apple Photos shared library, this will download a copy to each of your libraries, so doubling the amount of storage used for anything added to the Shared Library.

Your immediate fix is to move the smaller library onto the SSD and then investigate, search for duplicates (a feature in Photos) and delete some stuff, then I’d be tempted (if you can afford it) to buy a 2GB or larger external SSD to replace your 1TB external drive. The speed increase in doing so from a spinning HDD is insane especially on a larger library will make photos so much more usable. If you can’t swing for an external SSD buy a 4TB external spinning disk and make sure it all stays backed up.

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He’s saying though that the Mac mini matches his iCloud storage so the point about shared library may not be accurate.

Apple’s iCloud Shared Photo Library does not count against the iCloud storage of each participant- only the hostess. So if the storage size matches the Mac mini, that can’t be the cause right?

I am thinking a 4K at 60fps video.

You can use power photos (paid) app on Mac to sort the images by size.

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That’s a great shout. I’d forgotten that.

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+1

I don’t recall sorting by size, but I used this software to fix problems for several of my users in years past.

https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos/

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Just checked. It does sort by size. :grinning:

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Good to know. Thanks.

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Yes, please try Powerphotos. There is a v3 beta on their site you may want to tinker with before purchasing.

I’ve used this app to sort my entire library by size to see what was taking up so much room. It turned out to be my son’s baptism where I recorded at 4K 60fps for like 30 minutes. Took like 10% of my 200GB allotment lol .

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Thank you all — some very useful suggestions made.

Just to be clear — no “shared” library — just my library on my user account (which is logged in/open 100% of the time), and then my wife’s photo library (also on the same HDD), but accessed from within her user account.

My thoughts were that maybe there were issues with the wife’s photo library on her account (despite being logged in “in the background”) — and that Photos.app was trying to sync, but having issues with her account not being the “foreground/active” user account (thereby creating duplicates/issues in the photos database, or some such. But I acknowledge I have no evidence of this.

Having checked my iPhone camera settings — I started running into space issues on my 256GB iPhone (probably due to those exact same settings), and so moved down to Record Video at “1080p at 60 fps”, Record Slo-mo at “720p at 240 fps”, and "Record Cinematic at “4K at 30 fps”.
I guess that might then explain things, in terms of the ballooning size of things — but will try the suggestions around sorting things, to see what the biggest files are.

Lastly, the DAS I had attached to the MacMini seems to have picked up issues as well — which I suspect might be related to it now being very long in the tooth, and the more modern versions of macOS, no longer playing nicely with how it was formatted (RAID 5). Will see if I can save it first, and then use that “reacquired” space, to try and verify things in the libraries.

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Is the DAS controlling the formatting or the Mac?

MacOS should’ve have any issue at all with the formatting if the DAS is controlling it, in this case macOS only sees a disk.

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…and not to be that guy, but RAID 5 is independent of filesystem. (Yes, there is a limit as to what is supported) but you could have ext, ext2, ext3, ext4, BTRFS, HFS, HFS+, NTFS…and on and on.

To @geoffaire’s point, I would try to rehydrtate the DAS as indeed it is seen as a disk

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FWIW My photo library alone is over 500GB and I have all my photos taken at lower resolutions. Personally I’d assume those are the real sizes and pony up for more storage while you try to clean out any unwanted photos.

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I don’t know if it still supports it (and I’d never recommend it) but I think that macOS used to support software raid, if that’s the case macOS will see the actual disks