Photos: condensing library and videos and iCloud. Any Help?

[hvigil75]

Photos: condensing library and videos and iCloud

I have an iMac and a Macbook Pro. I have a very large photos library that has about 1500 videos in it (total items less than 16,000). The videos are eating u all of my hard drive memory. I purchased additional memory in iCloud and uploading everything to there. My goal is to have the photos on the iMac and host them to the Macbook and the videos in the cloud. I want to download groups of videos at a time where I can put them into iMovie and put together movies. I have two backup copies on an ext. hard drive of the videos. And I use time machine. I have spent so many hours researching this issue, because right now the iMac and the Macbook are going to both have full hard drives. I am pretty sure if I delete my videos out of the library when iCloud updates they will be removed from there. Any suggestions or advice, would be very helpful.

 

[mikeo007]

Re: Photos: condensing library and videos and iCloud

Here's an article that explains how you can upload your library to iCloud and download them on a case-by-case basis.
How to save space on your Mac with 'optimized storage' and iCloud Photo Library | iMore

Follow the guide, and whenever you want to use a clip in iMovie, it will automatically download from iCloud and only take up space while you're using it.

 

[hvigil75]

Re: Photos: condensing library and videos and iCloud

Hi Mike,

Thank you! I don't think I had found this exact article. I do have all of these options checked. One last question, so this means that they are stored in iCloud unless I go into iCloud and delete them from iCloud. So now I am safe to delete the videos from my Photos app and just leave my photos?

 

[mikeo007]

Re: Photos: condensing library and videos and iCloud

I think when you see them in your library, you're actually seeing what's stored in your icloud. You're seeing thumbnails (really small versions) of your images, so the images themselves aren't stored on the computer. I think deleting them from the library is actually deleting them from iCloud, at least for pictures.

I'm not sure how videos work since I don't save them in my Photos library, so they may work differently. You could try making a copy of one video and then deleting the original and see if it gets deleted from iCloud as well, but I'm not really sure what would happen.