Jan 27, 2020 Photos. Store all original, full-resolution photos and videos in iCloud Photos. When storage space is needed, only space-saving (optimised) versions of photos are kept on your Mac. To download the original photo or video, just open it. Store all messages and attachments in iCloud.
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Your hard drive once seemed impossibly huge, but now you’re running out of room. What can you delete safely? Maria Langer helps you decide how to perform triage on both data and Mac system files.
From the author of ![Insufficient Disc Space Photo Library Mac Air Insufficient Disc Space Photo Library Mac Air](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125657658/385777150.jpeg)
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide
It’s happened to all of us. We buy a new computer with a hard disk so big we’re convinced we could never fill it up. Six months or a year later, we wonder where all that free space went and we worry about having enough space for the next six months.
Before you run out and get a new hard disk, you can do a few things to free up space on the hard disk you already have. If you offload the things you really don’t need, you might wind up with enough room to put off that new hard disk purchase until you’re ready for a whole new computer.
In this article, I explain how to find and delete files that are unnecessarily filling up your hard disk so you can free up space for new files. I start with the easy stuff — the document files you can archive and take off your hard disk because you really don’t need them there — and work my way up to unused application and system files that probably shouldn’t be on your hard disk in the first place.
Take Out the Trash
If you’ve used a Mac for any length of time, you should know that items you put in the Trash stay there – and on your hard disk – until you empty the Trash. This is pretty basic stuff and I shouldn’t have to tell you.
If you’re brand new to a Mac and don’t know how to do this, it’s easy. Here are three different ways to get the job done:
- In the Finder, choose Finder > Empty Trash (Figure 1).
- In the Finder, press Shift-Command-Delete.
- With any application active, point to the Trash icon in the Dock, hold down the mouse button, and choose Empty Trash from the menu that appears (Figure 2).
Figure 1 To empty the Trash, choose Finder, Empty Trash.
Figure 2 You can also use the Trash’s shortcut menu to empty the trash.
What you might not know, however, is that some programs maintain their own separate Trash. iPhoto is a good example. When you delete a photo in iPhoto, it goes into iPhoto’s Trash “folder.” You can view the contents of its Trash by selecting the Trash item under Recent in the sidebar. As shown in Figure 3, when the Trash is selected, the total number of items and the disk space they occupy are shown at the bottom of the sidebar. When you empty iPhoto’s trash, you permanently remove these items from disk.
To empty iPhoto’s trash, choose iPhoto > Empty iPhoto Trash (Figure 4) or press Shift-Command-Delete. Click OK in the dialog that appears. The items are permanently removed from iPhoto – and your hard disk.
Figure 4 Choose iPhoto > Empty iPhoto Trash.
iPhoto isn’t the only application with its own Trash. Check the documentation for the applications you use, or just peek under the application or File menu. That’s usually where you find commands related to an application’s internal Trash.
Clear Off Your Desktop
If you’re like me, your Mac’s desktop is a minefield of file and folder icons. What is all that junk? Do you need it all? Go through it all, file the keepers, and delete the junk. Then empty the Trash.
Don’t do what I do, which is to wait until there are too many icons to actually find new ones that arrive and then file them all in a Desktop Junk folder on the Desktop. That just shuffles the junk around; it doesn’t eliminate it and clear out disk space.
As I type this, almost 1 GB of disk space on my main Mac is taken up by 539 files on my Desktop, most of which are in a Desktop Junk folder I created to keep them out of the way. Very dumb!
Clear Out the Downloads Folder
In the most recent Mac OS X versions, files you download from the Web are usually saved to the Downloads folder. You can find this folder inside your Home folder. You may even have an icon for it in the Dock.
![Photo Photo](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125657658/535188631.jpg)
Have you ever looked inside this folder? It contains all the files you downloaded, even the ones you didn’t think of as downloads at the time. For example, when you click a Web page link that displays a PDF file, that PDF file is downloaded to your computer and stored in – you guessed it – the Downloads folder. You’ll also find Quicken or QuickBooks account download files (if you use the Web connect feature), image attachments to e-mail messages that you may have saved by clicking the Save button in Mail, and countless other files you may not realize are on your computer.
As I type this, there’s 2.72 GB of disk space taken up by the 112 files in my Downloads folder (Figure 5) – and I routinely weed out the junk.
Figure 5 Is your Downloads folder full of junk you don’t need?
Roll up your sleeves and dive into that folder. Delete the files you don’t want or need. Move the ones you do want to a more appropriate location on your hard disk or back them up to a CD or other media. Then empty the Trash.
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If you’re using the new Photos app on your Mac instead of the older iPhoto app, you most likely have a duplicate photo library floating around on your hard drive. For a lot of people, that could mean gigs and gigs of wasted storage space, especially on shared Macs with multiple migrated libraries.
Here’s how to check for multiple libraries and how to delete them…
Insufficient Disc Space Photo Library Mac Air 2
Before deleting your old library: Make a backup
While the Photos app should have imported all your photos and videos just fine, I always recommend having backups handy. Perhaps you’ll delete an old photo by accident at some point and want it back later. If you have a copy of your old iPhoto library still handy, you can pull it form there as a last resort.
I saved my old iPhoto library to my Dropbox account. You can of course use any service of your choice, or just drop it onto an external hard disk you have laying around. Regardless of how you do it, I’d highly recommend saving a copy before deleting it.
Once you’ve backed up your old iPhoto library (if you chose to do so), you can proceed with deleting it:
- Open a new Finder window on your Mac.
- Click on Pictures in the left hand navigation. If it isn’t there, just search for your pictures folder using Spotlight.
- You should see two libraries, one is your old iPhoto Library and one is your new Photos library.
- Move your iPhoto Library to your trash can and empty it.
Check the storage space on your Mac, you should notice that you have more storage space available. If you are on a shared Mac and have multiple user logins, everyone using the new version of Photos on that Mac should make sure they don’t also have duplicate libraries.
I’m not sure why Apple doesn’t create a process to delete old versions of libraries after migrating to Photos, but they should. Until that happens, you’ll have to delete your old library manually.
Give this tip a try and see how much storage space you were able to clear up. As you can see in the screens above, my old iPhoto library was over 30GB, which was definitely a healthy chunk of hard drive space that I now have back.
Delete songs from itunes library on mac. . Open the Apple Music app and find the item that you want to delete.
Insufficient Disc Space Photo Library Mac Airport
Your Mac storage tips?
Space Photographs
This is one of many ways to regain storage space on your Mac without having to sacrifice losing data. But we know there are lots of others. What are some of your favorite Mac storage tips for recapturing space? We’ve love to hear them in the comments!
Insufficient Disc Space Photo Library Mac Air Pro
Update
A follower on Twitter referenced to me an article written on Six Colors pointing out that the library is actually hard-linked between versions. While this may be true when you first migrate, it seems that if you make any changes to any files and the libraries become different, splicing can and will occur.
To test this theory, I deleted my iPhoto library on my other Mac to see how much storage was freed up. For those wondering, my iPhoto library was 35.99 GB and my Photos library was 41.16 GB. You can see the before and after results on my hard disk space below. I was able to free up over 20 GB of space. So I’m not sure what I think about hard linking or how well it’s actually working between Photos and iPhoto.
Bottom line, if you’re short on storage space and you want to free some up, there’s really not much point in having two photo libraries floating around on your Mac. Hard linking or not, deleting the old library will free up space in almost every case.