My iCloud is already almost maxed out and I have the 200GB plan. My initial thought is to export out videos that are older and taking up space and putting them on an external I have that gets backed up weekly. At first I exported as a test 10 videos but there isn’t a progress bar like in Lightroom. Now what I did was make an album of 500 or so videos from before 2021 to archive. My plan is that tonight I’ll export them to the external hard drive and then delete them from my iCloud. Any issue with this? Wish there was a storage tier for 1TB for iCloud. Also have this in the software section, wasn’t sure here or in tech support.
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There’s a progress bar in Photos. Well, a circle. It appears in the upper left corner, next to the zoom slider.
You might find this useful. I’ve used it for years to manage Photos.
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Yeah found that finally, it’s sorta hidden.
Downloaded the trial and like it. I think I’m going to have to export the photos first. For whatever reason, it’s not letting me turn off the iCloud library to download originals to my Mac. I’d imagine that’s because of storage space.
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I found several references to that problem. This was one of the most detailed
LOL, I have exactly the same issue. Although I already gone passed 200GB. You may want to check out this post as we are discussing similar issues here. I am now trialling photosync.
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I think the obvious thing is to back up my stuff prior to turning off iCloud photos. I’m exporting a bunch of videos now and by now they should be done. I’ll back up and then delete from my iCloud to see how that affects my storage for the better. I like the idea of archiving every year photos and videos etc. That said I also love the idea of PhotoSync as @fuzzygel suggested. Maybe a combo of the two is in order.
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Just an update, I’ve exported a bunch of files from my iCloud to my external drive. Then I went and used Gemini 2 to detect duplicates. Although I’ve used the program before, it wasn’t auto-selecting the photos in my iPhone Camera library automatically or when I selected that as a preferred selection to delete. I began manually selecting one by one the items to delete, sorted by size. Cleared up about 20-30 GB of space on iCloud, so that’s helped so far. I’ll continue to do that unless anybody else has a suggestion of a better program/method/technique.
I would agree on that one. It’s placed in a weird place and on top of that music has a separate progress bar for iCloud stuff at the very bottom of the photo gallery. Which is sort of dumb as you need to scroll all the way if you want to have a look at it.
Hey all, just a quick update…in looking at some of my video files (I’m about to back up my photos to Backblaze B2), I was curious about my video files I had exported. They are still there. Problem is that the date that they were exported now shows as the created date. On TikTok videos I’ve saved, that doesn’t matter. Other personal videos though show as created in March 2022 which is incorrect. Not sure if there’s a fix, but an observation nonetheless.Apparently, the app Media Meta is able to do this.
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@Jonathan_Davis - Thank you for this post. This will help me and a friend I am helping.
Could you maybe expand on the “Tik Tok” videos you have saved? I come across videos on Tik Tok that I view and want to recall for later reference, however, I have not come across a good way to do so. I was hoping you could elaborate thinking you may have solved this issue for me.
