r/ApplePhotos

There seem to be several apps posted here recently that advertise they remove photo duplicates, help select the best photo, clean out the photo library, etc

I'm looking for an app that is:

- privacy focused (everyone done local),
- does not care if I am using iCloud (I'm not)
- able to find short videos < 2s as they're likely for deletion
- remove duplicates
- recommend best photo out of a series of photos taken on trips
- works on Apple Photos on Mac (not only iPhone!) for Photo Cleaner:Swipewipe App seems OK but only for phone camera roll

Thanks

I currently have around 3TB of photos in my iCloud from the past 5 years. I’m paying for the 6TB iCloud tier right now, but I want to stop this subscription and move everything to external storage.

I’ve already bought a Samsung T7 4TB SSD, but I’ve heard that HDDs might actually be better for long-term “cold storage” due to durability and cost per TB, so I’m also reconsidering whether SSD is the right choice here. I am meanwhile looking into getting an HHD such as a Seagate.

I’m deciding between two possible approaches to move my photos on to this external harddrive:

1. Manual export via Apple Photos:
Following this guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplePhotos/comments/188hv9o/what_is_the_best_way_to_back_up_photos_from/

The idea would be to fully export my iCloud Photos library to an external drive, verify everything is backed up, and then delete the photos from iCloud so I can downgrade my storage plan (ideally to 1TB and save costs).

Long-term, I’d repeat this process every 5–10 years and create a new Apple Photos library each time, since very large Photos libraries can become slow and less responsive over time.

2. Using Parachute for Mac
Using an app like “Parachute for Mac” to transfer everything from iCloud Photos directly to an external hard drive. From what I’ve read, it’s faster and more automated than method 1.

However, it exports everything into folder structures rather than an Apple Photos library. That could actually be a plus since it would make the files accessible on any device (Mac/PC), but I mainly use Apple devices so I’m not sure how important that is for me.

So I’m trying to decide:
Which method is generally safer / more reliable for long-term archival of a large iCloud Photos library like this?

Would appreciate any advice or experiences - thanks!

Hola comunidad, soy nueva en esto. Tengo un iPhone 13 y estuve pagando por los 50GB adicionales por varios meses, sin embargo, en el último período me empezó a aparecer la notificación de "almacenamiento lleno", supongo que tanto del iPhone como de iCloud, sin embargo, borraba algunas aplicaciones y todo iba bien nuevamente. Sin embargo, hace un par de días, el almacenamiento se llenó de nuevo. Repentinamente la fototeca se puso en blanco y me aparecía que "no habían fotos disponibles" pero felizmente empezaron a volver de a pocos pero luego me percaté de que más de la mitad de mis fotos ya no estaban. Rogué con todas mis fuerzas que estuvieran en iCloud y gracias a Dios así fue. El asunto ahora es que, son como dos fototecas independientes. Lo que veo en mi iPhone, no aparece en iCloud y lo que veo en iCloud, no está en mi teléfono. Pese a que actualicé al plan de 200GB pero fue justo en el momento en que este "colapso" ocurrió, es decir, lo hice cuando vi el desastre. Me contacté con soporte de Apple porque en la fototeca del teléfono me figura "restauración desde iCloud en pausa. Optimizando el rendimiento del sistema" y me dijeron que solo se trataba de sincronizar, que apretara la opción de "sincronizar ahora" y que eso era todo pero honestamente no me da confianza. He leído cientos de testimonios de usuarios que perdieron todas sus fotos al sincronizar el iPhone con iCloud por lo que hasta ahora no sé qué hacer para tener lo mi iCloud en mi iPhone y tampoco tengo la seguridad de que nada se irá de iCloud o de mi teléfono al hacer este procedimiento. Algo que acabo de descubrir es que lo que borro en mi teléfono (lo que se mantiene por 30 días), tampoco se ve reflejado en iCloud. Ha sido un trauma tremendo creer que he perdido recuerdos de viajes y momentos preciados, por ello quiero tener la mayor precaución antes de sincronizar o hacer lo que corresponda. Agradecería mucho su ayuda ya que me siento frustrada y perdida.

Hey all, looking for some honest feedback from people who actually edit RAWs in Apple Photos regularly.

Quick context: I haven't touched a proper RAW editor in close to 6 years. Recently picked up a Fujifilm X-E5 and I'm shooting Fine JPEG + lossless compressed RAW. My workflow is to import into Apple Photos, switch the original to the RAW file, and edit from there.

The thing is, I'm not really satisfied with what I'm getting out of it. I'm no pro colorist, but I can see that when I lift the shadows, there's just not a lot of detail coming back. Moving the black point seems to help a little, but overall it doesn't feel like the RAW latitude I remember from my Lightroom days. Back then it felt like I could pull a lot more out of a file before things broke down.

So a few questions:

1. Is the X-E5 even properly supported in Apple Photos yet? It's a newer body so I'm wondering if the RAW pipeline is still catching up.
2. Is this just how Apple Photos handles Fuji files in general? I know Fuji RAFs can be tricky.
3. For anyone who's been in the same spot, did switching to something like Photomator actually improve things noticeably?

I'm specifically looking for something with a perpetual license, no subscriptions. Capture One is on my radar but the upgrade-per-camera-model thing rubs me the wrong way.

Would love to hear if anyone has had similar frustrations, or if I'm just missing something obvious in Apple Photos. Recommendations welcome.

Thanks!

Hello everyone,

I’m doing a huge photo cleanup and trying to move everything to an external hard drive. My priority is the 30,000 photos on my iPhone because I’m out of storage and my phone is becoming almost unusable.

When I connect my iPhone to my computer with a USB cable, only about 12,000 photos appear instead of the 30,000 that are actually on my phone, so I gave up on that method.

I then upgraded to the 2 TB iCloud plan, thinking I could download everything from iCloud, organize it on my hard drive, and then delete the photos from my phone. But in iCloud, I can only see photos up to January.

I created albums on my iPhone named 2020, 2021, 2022, etc. so I could sort everything by year and simply download each album, move the photos into the correct folder on my computer, and be done. But these albums do not appear in iCloud, and I can’t find them.

I’m also worried about losing photos during the transfer. On top of that, iCloud still contains old screenshots and images downloaded from the internet that I had already deleted from my phone, so downloading from iCloud would mean a huge amount of extra sorting even though everything is already organized on my iPhone.

I’ve been working on this for months. I already sorted all my photos and videos from 2005 to 2015, and now I’m working on the more recent years.
It used to be so much easier when everything was stored directly on a camera and all you had to do was transfer the files. This whole cloud situation is driving me crazy.

Sorry if this question has been asked before, but I feel completely lost. What is the safest and easiest way to transfer everything without losing photos? 😔

I now have a clearer picture on how this works, after doing a direct transfer from google takeout to a iCloud test account tied to my family storage. What I see from this test practice is the following

- HEIC files transfered from Google are HEIF after transfer, they are also different in sizes - this makes them re-upload to Google Photos as duplicates if Google Photos sync is not turned off

- Albums transfered are a lot more than the source, haven't seen through all names and so on, but seems like there are duplicates. only some of them contains pictures though, so seems like they are the "real ones"

- on the positive side, apple photos detects a lot of duplicates so far, that Google Photos haven't "said" anything about.

With these experiences in mind I have the following plan to do a proper migration:

situation today: my wifi and I share one google photos account for all our photos.

- Decide on a cutover date
- at cutover date, disable Google Photos sync on both our phones
- start Google Takeout transfer to iCloud after disabling Google Photos sync
- Use Google Photos as a read only source until transfer is complete (about a week)
- Start using iCloud/apple photos for 6 months, then do a decision on what to do long term.

If we don't like apple photos enough I will do manual upload of the last 6 months, delete iCloud Photos and then re-enable Google Photos sync.

One caveat with all of this is that we have had iCloud Photos running for 2-3 years on both our accounts, so takeout might create duplicates for these years. Haven't decided how I will do this, either delete everything in iCloud first, then start over again or just hope that apple photos duplicate detection is good enough to fix them all. a third option might be to add all photos in Google Photos to yearly albums and use them when transferring

I've used Google Photos in the past for 5 years. Worked great. But I am not a big fan of the invasive AI features it has these days. Basically most of my videos are highlighted with "key moment" in the scrub bar, and I don't like the idea of AI going through my stuff.

So, I moved to iCloud and synced my whole library there. But here is the problem, while it is great, I own an iPhone, iPad and a Windows laptop. The Windows laptop works fine with iCloud for the most part but its still very restricted, and iCloud Takeout of the photos is a jumbled mess without any metadata.

Now I am reaching a point where I need to pay for the next month, and decide if I am going to stick with Google Photos or iCloud.

I do have backups on multiple HDDs and SSDs, so backup is not a problem. I just need an online cloud storage solution.

Took forever but here it is. VidSquash for iOS (totally free for now..hoping to get some appreciation/fb):
auto-discovers large videos in my photo library, batch compresses them including HDR with before/after comparison before i delete originals, reminds me periodically, and is totally offline with no data collection.

It can also optimize videos for sending on discord/whatsapp/others or with custom settings.
It solved my pain points around my iCloud storage and phone running slow issues - hope it solves yours too. Happy to add any new features you see important and useful.

https://preview.redd.it/l6nvmq2qiz1h1.png?width=1136&format=png&auto=webp&s=fc3a82b886fd7f23bf0e2437fbb112ed96bc29b0

Completely free on the app store for now(app store direct link here). No ads, no in-app purchases, no data collection - only efficient hardware accelerated batch video compression to free up storage.

Please do comment if you find it useful - so far no meaningful downloads :(. Hoping it helps someone out there.

EDIT: I did the same for photos - choose large photos in bulk, send them through airplay/batch send in email etc or just compress down to a smaller size. App store direct link for PicSquash is here. Also completely free, offline capable, no ads, no in-app purchases, no data collection, no login.

I have a large folder (38gb) in ~/Library/Photos called "Libraries". If I drill down, it contains pix and video (imported from phone) that I recently imported from my phone to the local Photos library on my Mac, but it also dates back a few years.

I'm not low on space, just trying to understand the purpose. All the pics are in my Photos library. I have iCloud Photos turned off.

macOS Tahoe 26.5

Have an intel i7 imac with an account i called family to distinguish from my own and used to import phone/video from our then physical cameras so this was before icloud/apple ID libraries - so the media only exists in this device login (and SD cards if still readable) and god willing several drives of time capsule backups.

Want to get them off the HD now and accessible via other means. How would you proceed? The video in particular was obnoxious canon own HD format (AVCHD) that only apple conversion tool could import so hoping am able to export/archive in human usable Mxx format.

For the photos would I need to "export to full size" or are they already since there's no icloud apple ID associated with these libraries?

Thank you

I’ve been using a work iCloud account on a work phone but my company has decided to switch to Android (cheaper apparently), and needs their phone back. I have now set up my own personal iCloud account and want to keep all of my photos and videos. I followed some steps from YouTube to copy my entire media library to an external hard drive—is there any chance that the external hard drive library becomes inaccessible if the work iCloud account is ever deleted?

should i enable optimised storage? i have about 7gb free on my iphone 14 128gb but thats only because i regularly have to go in and clear apps etc. it always fills up.

can i just have it for pictures past a certain time frame?

My Apple Photos library has close to 15,000 images in it. Decades of images and photos, organised into dozens of Albums.

It includes many thousands of 'Inspiration' images, including many screenshots captured in PNG format. This bloats the library size hugely, and consumes far more local/iCloud storage than it needs to.

With webp being supported, and producing much smaller filesizes with no real loss of quality (compared to PNG) is there any way to convert PNG images in the library, possibly above a certain filesize, into webp, while retaining name, date added, meta data, and importantly, have them remain in whatever albums they're already present in?

Thanks for any pointers.

Hello, my wife and I have too many photos and it’s taking up so much space. I’ve already offloaded my photos to my 1TB iPad but it’s already about 60% full now.

Do any of you use a separate app that uses its own cloud so I can still access photos through that app on any of my devices? The way I’ve done it with my iPad means I can ONLY view the photos on that iPad but the iPad stays at home.

I was looking into the UGREEN hub that costs about $400 but realized I need to buy my own hard drives and to max out that device it’s like $5000 worth of hard drives. (I could buy low storage hard drives temporarily but I don’t want to then have to figure out how to transfer those photos again to the larger drives).

Any suggestions or apps that you guys use? If an app has a subscription, please let me know the cost.

Thanks

Over the years I ended up accumulating 10 different Apple Photos libraries across multiple Macs, imports, exports and backup copies.

When I changed Macs in 2016 and again in 2019, I kept older libraries as safety backups before migrating everything. Over time this slowly created duplicated media, fragmented organization and inconsistent structures between libraries.

The archive also contained media going back to the early 2000s, long before GPS metadata became common in cameras and phones, so many photos simply had no location information at all.

At some point I realized the Photos libraries themselves were gradually becoming operational archives rather than clean photo collections.

So before consolidating and importing everything again, I normalized the archive structure at file level first.

The normalization process eventually handled:

• 10 Apple Photos libraries
• 116,445 media files
• duplicated photos and videos
• older media without GPS metadata
• backup libraries accumulated across years of Mac migrations

The goal was not to replace Apple Photos, but to prepare a cleaner and more consistent archive before importing everything again into a new organized library.

During normalization:

• duplicated media was not copied to the destination folders
• media without GPS metadata was isolated for later review
• the remaining files were reorganized into a deterministic archive structure before import

After normalization, the libraries became much easier to consolidate into a cleaner Apple Photos workflow without carrying years of duplicated structures and fragmented imports forward again.

One interesting thing during the process is that managed Photos libraries behaved much more predictably than the exported backup structures accumulated over the years.

Most of the structural fragmentation actually came from:

• backup copies
• exports
• duplicated migrations
• recursive archive accumulation
• inconsistent imports between libraries

Files/year

 

I’m curious how other long-time Apple Photos users handle:

• multiple libraries
• Mac migrations
• backup libraries
• duplicated imports
• older photos without GPS metadata

I also documented parts of the normalization process while rebuilding the archive. Happy to share more details if anyone is interested.

P.S.: English is not my native language. The text was reviewed with AI assistance, but the benchmark, analysis, and operational observations are entirely real-world results from the normalization process.

I am going to make a backup of my Mac library that is synced to my phone. The Mac says it's synced up, but my phone has been saying it still has 3 photos to sync. The photo count between both devices is 3 off. It's been saying that for a week. I've restarted, have charged every night, have paused and resumed the sync.

Is there any way to see what photos are not synced? I'm not even sure there even are any photos in reality because of how flaky the photos counts seem to be in large libraries.

I deleted photos on my phone and they are still on my MacBook. I think they are locally stored on my Mac but from what I've seen it should still sync and delete.

Both phone & Mac have completed their sync. The pictures are removed from my recently deleted. I deleted the photos a few days ago.

Is this how it's supposed to work? I would like to keep my photos stored locally on my Mac if possible but also have them be sync'd on my iCloud.