Hey, Mac peeps, help me help someone out! (I’m thinking of @glennf or @joekissell as likely candidates for answering this, or might know someone who can.)

Please boost!

I have an ex-editor of mine (when I wrote for Australian Macworld, great guy) who has asked me a Mac question, and while I don’t know the answer, you might! Here goes…

Hey, I have a curly Mac question that I can’t find an answer to. Hoping you can help.

I have thousands of photos in my Photos library. Way too many to keep locally, so I use iCloud. The way that’s supposed to work is that there are low-res thumbnails on the local disk and full-res originals are kept in the cloud and downloaded only when you need them.

All good.

I’m doing a project (posters for my child’s 21st) that involves uploading thousands of photos from my library to Canva. For many of them, I’m doing a bit of editing first for red-eye, etc. So I’ve downloaded hundreds (so far) of originals from iCloud.

At first this went pretty smoothly.

Now, however, my Mac is screaming that it’s running out of space, Photos is returning unknown errors and the project has ground to a halt.

My hypothesis is that even though I’ve finished the editing and uploaded to Canva — and therefore don’t need them anymore — the full-res originals are still sitting on my local drive.

Do you know how long Photos hangs on to those originals before syncing them back and leaving me with drive space? Do you know if there’s a way to make it happen sooner?

The obvious solution is to move the library to an external drive with tonnes of space. And I will do that. But it’s a band-aid.

#MacHelp #ApplePhotos #AppleiCloud #MacSupport #MacQuestion #MacQuestions