Photos, Music and TV

Manage all the various media you keep on your Mac

The biggest space hogs on your Mac are likely to be your photos, videos and music libraries. Don’t worry. You can save space here without losing a thing.

Too many photos?

The more megapixels your iPhone can shoot, the bigger the file size of the resulting photos and videos. If you have sufficient iCloud storage you can offload the high-resolution versions to Apple by selecting Optimise Mac Storage in Photos > Preferences. However, we’d recommend moving your Photos library to an external drive (see below) and including that in your backup.

You could upload to Facebook, Google Photos or Flickr. However, there are limits – Facebook reduces the image quality while there are library limits of 15GB for Google and 1,000 photos for Flickr (unless you pay to upgrade) – and it can be laborious getting your photos back, especially if you have lots to download.

When music’s too massive

For £21 a year iTunes Match copies your music library to Apple’s cloud; if you have Apple Music or Apple One, iCloud Music Library does much the same by finding matches in the Apple Music catalogue. It matches your library with Apple’s, so you can delete your file and stream or download from Apple. It isn’t always perfect, though, and it doesn’t cover every music format. Both options require an ongoing subscription; spending your money on and keeping your tracks on an external drive is a one-off expense.