Password required to activate the iCloud photo library and limit space used by Photos in my hard drive

thierryeu wrote:

Hi everyone,

When I go to 'Storage' in 'About this mac' and click on 'Store in iCloud' in the iCloud section of the window, I get an error message that says that my password is required to activate the iCloud photo library and that I need to open my System Preferences to activate the iCloud photo library. However, I have double checked several times my system preferences and iCloud is already activated. I look it up on different forums and apparently this problem is not new.

Ignore it. The "Storage > Manage Storage" dialog is always recommending to enable iCloud, even if you already are using it. That is confusing and silly, but if you have enabled iCloud Photos in the Photos.app in "Photos > Preferences > iCloud", your photos are stored in iCloud. Do not change your iCloud Preferences, or you are risking a new upload of all photos to iCloud.

If you do not want to keep local copies of your Photos, enable "Optimise Mac Storage" in "Photos > Preferences > iCloud". Photos will try to keep as many photos as possible locally on your Mac nevertheless. You cannot limit the amount of local storage for your Photos. But once all your Photos are in iCloud you can purge all local copies by deleting your local Photos Library from your Pictures folder and starting over with an empty Photos Library. But you have to be sure, that all your photos have already been uploaded to iCloud, before you try that. See: How to force Photos for Mac to Optimise the Storage Immediately

thierryeu wrote:

Thank you very much for this answer. It’s extremely helpful.

One more question: if I do as you suggest, will I see in Photos the thumbnails of the pictures that have been uploaded in iCloud but that are deleted from my Mac library?

Best,

Thierry

Be careful what you delete.

You must not delete photos from your Mac library. You have to delete the library it self - the item "Photos Library.photoslibrary" if you delete photos from your Mac Library in Photos while viewing the Photos in Photos, the photos will be deleted from iCloud as well, because the library is syncing with iCloud. Only if you remove the current library and start over with a new, empty library, the Photos will remain in iCloud and appear in your new library again, so you can see the thumbnails and browse the library. Over time the size of the library will increase again slowly, because Photos will keep the downloaded photos when you are viewing a photo enlarged.