Suddenly, my Mac stopped synching my photos:
I have tons of free space on iCloud, and optimize storage is turned on:
There's no way that photos should take up 170 GB of space when there's only 250 GB in total of photos on iCloud:
I have tried:
- Turning this function on and off in Photos.app
- Rebooting apps and the device
- Using all available options in the 'manage storage' dialog
- Turning off synching entirely: System Preferences > Internet Accounts > iCloud > Photos (uncheck) > Delete from my device
What else can I try to fix this bug?
Running the latest version of macOS.
Update: Super buggy. I tried turning off iCloud completely, and now get this — 170GB of undeletable "Other" photos stuck on my Mac:
I expected more paying for a premium MacBook Pro and $120 a year of iCloud synching. Do I need to take extreme measures and reinstall macOS completely?
Best Answer
There’s no reason to take extreme measures.
Now you can use the new admin account to examine if pruning local snapshots clears all the data. If not, delete your old user account (it’s safely backed up) and repeat cleaning snapshots. Only then would I consider an erase install if the storage allocation doesn’t make sense.
To get control of iCloud, you can restore your user account from backup while the internet is disabled, then disable cloud sync and learn why full automatic didn’t give you the results you expected. Nothing seems fundamentally wrong other than perhaps not considering APFS snapshots and needing to gather some info on how much photo data is actually reported as being in the cloud.