You can focus on folders with 20 GB or larger and make a list of things - perhaps asking a follow on question if you have things in ~/Library that need clearing up.

Then use the triangles next to the folder to see where the disk storage is actually being used.

Click on the size column in the window to have the largest items at the top of the finder window.

Check the Calculate all sizes control at the bottom of the preference window and close the pref window.

Go to Computer (Command + Shift + C or use the Go menu).

If you're running against a wall thinking it's photos, instead find the folders with the largest usage: I'm running High Sierra and having Time Machine backups. With Finder, delete the old 'Photos Library.photoslibrary' and rename your blank library with that directory name. Hold down key option and invoke Photos again. So, if you are on a MacBook, connect to the ac power and just don't put your MacBook and hard disks on sleep.Īlternatively, if you have already moved the entire library and just clean up the whole, close Photos first. I believe that they are the image caches, thumbnails, indices for searching and all other metadata files being cleaned up in the background.

However, Photos does not reclaim disk spaces immediately after you empty the Recently Deleted folder. There is a button, which allows you to delete items without waiting for the 30 days count down. It is indeed an application level trash bin in Photos. Photos will automatically delete it permanently after 30 days.

Images or videos in Photos are firstly moved to folder Recently Deleted once deleted. Someone told me I should turn off my Time Machine and delete all my backups, but I can't seem to find where the turn off button is.

I moved my entire catalog folder into my external hard drive and deleted the original from my MacBook to make space, but that only created about 2.98 GB of space. I am a photographer if you are wondering why I have that many photos, and keeping that in mind I also thought maybe it's my Lightroom catalogs thats taking up space. This is really frustrating as I searched my entire MacBook drive for any remaining photos, yet I can't find a single one even though it says that Photos are taking up about 50 GB of space on my MacBook hard drive. When I check what is taking up that space, its all photos, about 49.83 GB to be exact.

Currently there are 0 photos on my MacBook drive, yet I keep receiving a message saying my disk is critically low on space. I moved every single photo on my MacBook hard drive to the external hard drive and deleted all the photo copies remaining on my macbook drive. I recently ran out of space on my MacBook Pro because I have a lot of pictures saved to it, so I went out and bought an external hard drive (2 TB).

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