i've pulled down hundreds of GB 's worth of videos from iCloud to an HDD and then deleted the videos from Photos on my mac, and deleted the Recently Deleted bin. yet my storage is not changing. it's still super high. why is this? i've left it some days.
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.6
Where are you looking at the storage? The total of the storage used on your Mac or the storage used for photos and videos?
Just a hunch, but are you using Time Machine to make backups of your Mac?
The total of the storage may not decrease, when you are deleting files and are using Time Machine on a portable computer, like a MacBook Pro. Then Time Machine will save the deleted items temporarily in a local snapshot, until you are making a new backup on your external Time Machine drive. If you have not backed up your Mac after you freed the storage, you may want to make a current Time Machine backup to remove large local snapshots.
have you checked, if the photos and videos you have deleted from iCloud have gone from Photos on your iCloud webpage at www.icloud.com ? Has the deletion synced to all your other devices using iCloud Photos?
Are you by any chance using the Shared iCloud Photos Library and have it only recently set up? The Shared iCloud Photos Library is is keeping a local snapshot of your iCloud Photos Library in iCloud, so we can easily revert to the version of our personal Photos Library from the time before we set up the Shared Library. During the first few month after setting up the Shared iCloud Library we will not free any iCloud storage by deleting items from our iCloud Photos Library, because the will remain in the snapshot. I am not sure how long this snapshot will currently be kept, but when I set up my first Shared iCloud Photos Library I had to wait for six month until I could free storage and downgrade my subscription.
Where are you looking at the storage? The total of the storage used on your Mac or the storage used for photos and videos?
Just a hunch, but are you using Time Machine to make backups of your Mac?
The total of the storage may not decrease, when you are deleting files and are using Time Machine on a portable computer, like a MacBook Pro. Then Time Machine will save the deleted items temporarily in a local snapshot, until you are making a new backup on your external Time Machine drive. If you have not backed up your Mac after you freed the storage, you may want to make a current Time Machine backup to remove large local snapshots.
have you checked, if the photos and videos you have deleted from iCloud have gone from Photos on your iCloud webpage at www.icloud.com ? Has the deletion synced to all your other devices using iCloud Photos?
Are you by any chance using the Shared iCloud Photos Library and have it only recently set up? The Shared iCloud Photos Library is is keeping a local snapshot of your iCloud Photos Library in iCloud, so we can easily revert to the version of our personal Photos Library from the time before we set up the Shared Library. During the first few month after setting up the Shared iCloud Library we will not free any iCloud storage by deleting items from our iCloud Photos Library, because the will remain in the snapshot. I am not sure how long this snapshot will currently be kept, but when I set up my first Shared iCloud Photos Library I had to wait for six month until I could free storage and downgrade my subscription.
That could happen if you have the "Optimize Mac Storage" option selected for Photos on this Mac and the videos you have deleted had already been optimized down to smaller versions. The smaller versions would be deleted, but they would not make as much difference as might happen if you deleted items that had not already been optimized.
How does the size of your Photos library on disk[*] compare with the size in iCloud? That would give you some idea of how much optimization has already been accomplished (on the photos and videos you have not yet deleted).
[*] Unfortunately, Finder has a history of having a hard time computing the size of a Photos library accurately.
hi mark. thanks for your response. i do use "optimise mac storage" but everything was synch'd. i can't answer your next question as i've started a process based after reading your reply and the following one. about to respond there too. thanks
hi leonie.
thanks for your response and three points...
1/
i'm looking on my MacBook pro: system prefs. > <my name> apple account > icloud > manage > manage storage > Family usage.
2/
your hunch is right. i back up to a time machine drive. SO. i'm currently restoring the photos library from a snapshot i have from the day before i started deleting large videos and slomo files. this is because i'd only download modified not originals (stupidly). before starting this restore just now, i exported (originals) of all photos media since the date of that photos library that i am restoring, as i understand it's all or nothing and don't want to lose the new media. so if that restores ok, (happening now) i will then re-add the interim media mentioned. then i will re-commence offloading media (originals this time). NB - i'm slightly bemused that the snapshot i'm restoring is 1/10th the size of the current photos library. i opted for 'keep both' rather than replacing the current larger one. so nothing will be lost, in theory. thanks for posting out the time machine backup and all those snapshots. i get that when i'm fully happy with all this i could delete my time machine back up and start a new one. and maybe that will finally clear down my nearly 1TB storage.
FWIW i paid a one off fee for the desktop app PHOTO SORT which enables creation of an album of your largest files in Photos allowing you to set a total storage amount as a target. eg show me 300GB worth of my largest files. then these can be exported, sorted by size, the whole album could be deleted from Photos, emptying the recently deleted album. then any wanted in iCloud re-added from external drive back to Photos library. the app is here in the apple app store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/photosort-size-quality-sort/id6739038077?mt=12
in answer to your final question, i have shared albums - a fair few. but not a shared library. we use family sharing... each of the 5 of us has their own separate photos library tho.
i hope this is all clear and thanks for your input. i hope this helps others, and will follow up with final observations. BUT APPLE - please gives us control over our own data - let us sort by size, and suggest more deletion. let's not encourage filling up more and more heinous data centres with more data than we need to, whilst spending more and more money on cloud storage.
if this all doesn't work i'll try yours and mark's suggestions of checking the media on desktop iCloud.com, and my phone etc etc.
i can see already that restoring my photo library from TM is not going to work, and now understand that the reason the TM back up is smaller is that it doesn't have the originals in it. so i now know i have already fully deleted originals and can't recover them which is ok as they're not important videos and slo mo's and i have a version.
so next step is i guess to delete my time machine backups (if i'm confident i don't need any) and make a new clean one.
is your advice that that will jog iCloud to reduce in size?
iCloud photos size not decreasing after deleting
