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I recently backed up the photos on my Mac to iCloud and optimized their storage on my Mac to create storage space. It's my understanding that part of the optimization involves reducing photo resolution, etc. If I want to transfer the photos from my Mac to an external hard drive, will the original, full-resolution photos transfer, or do I need to first re-download them from iCloud?
MacBook Air 13", macOS 10.15
Hi,
It depends what you mean by 'transfer the photos to Mac'. If you use the export function then Photos will download the full version before copying it to your external drive.
However, if you just copy your Photos library from your mac to the external drive then it will only contain the low res thumbnails.
Hi,
It depends what you mean by 'transfer the photos to Mac'. If you use the export function then Photos will download the full version before copying it to your external drive.
However, if you just copy your Photos library from your mac to the external drive then it will only contain the low res thumbnails.
When you move your library to the external HD and set it to be the iCloud Photos library that will trigger another full upload/download of photos while Photos is checking both libraries to make sure they are identical.
If you want to change your local library to all full resolution photos as originals don't enable "Optimize Mad Storage" and the full sized resolutions will be downloaded to your new library. This will be faster than having optimized storage as there's no comparison going on, only a straight download.
Depending on whether you just want keep a copy of the photos as a back up on your external drive or copy the whole library and use that as the primary library as Old Toad suggests - if you just export the photos you'll need to decide if you want to keep a copy of both the original photos and the edited versions (assuming you plan to edit your photos in some way) or just one or the other.
MacBook photo storage optimization
