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leif51 Author

Level 1

4 points

Photo library

I have all photos in Photos and have them on iCloud. Can I take away the file Photo library without taking them away from Photos?

Posted on Feb 7, 2022 7:26 AM

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

196,989 points

Posted on Feb 7, 2022 7:49 AM

When you remove the Photos Library, you cannot use the Photos.app on your Mac to access the photos in iCloud. Photos needs a local library to work with your photos. Otherwise you can only access the iCloud Photos on your Mac using the web page www.icloud.com and the Photos.app on the web page. It will be very limited.

If you want to save some storage on your Mac, enable the option "Optimise Mac Storage" in the Photos > Preferences > iCloud. Then iCloud will remove some of the original image files from your Mac and replace them by smaller, optimised versions, when the Mac is getting low on storage.

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Photo library

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