What do you do about Mac's that are full due to pictures?

[thecomputerguy]

I don't generally work on a lot of Mac's but there seems to be a recurring issue with them. People with the Apple trio (Laptop/iMac, iPhone & iPad) tend to take a LOT of pictures. Many more pictures than people with PC's for some reason. People with Mac's also seem to LOVE plugging their phone in as often as they can which ends up syncing all of their photos.

I've run into Mac laptops with 500GB HD's in them and 350GB of pictures sitting on iPhoto, or whatever the native photo app is these days.

People also seem to think that their Macbook Air with 80GB of total storage should be capable of storing every single picture they take + every single song they have ever owned, which is obviously not the case.

I'm headed out to a client tomorrow with a Macbook Air that is completely out of storage. Anytime there is an issue with syncing or storage people always fall back onto the "I thought it was on the iCloud or something".

Anyways ... almost everywhere I read online, I get reccomendations to copy the entire iPhoto library to an external, then remove the library off the system and start anew with the existing library sitting on an external. The iPhoto library is just a single file you can copy that has all sorts of sub-folders in it including full copies of the images, thumbnails, etc etc ... It's just not as intuitive as moving photos off a PC where you can just grab a chunk of files and off-load them.

Apple seems to want people to keep everything in one spot so that the native app can manage it, which obviously makes it difficult if you need to split your library due to storage issues.

Is there a better way to off-load some pictures somewhere else? Apple told her she can delete them from her library and they 'should' remain on iCloud, but I'm not fond of being the person to take that risk.

 

[Mainstay]

Copy the photo library to an external drive or NAS. Create a backup from the NAS to an external drive (connected to the NAS) and/or to the cloud. Confirm all is OK. Delete from Source.

We do this with all those poor users that bought MBA's and suddenly discovered 120 GB just isn't going to cut it (and the cost of a HD upgrade in those beasts is very expensive).

All will be fine, but they can no longer view their images on the move.

(also consider ditching Photos, the app is not wonderful).

 

[thecomputerguy]

Copy the photo library to an external drive or NAS. Create a backup from the NAS to an external drive (connected to the NAS) and/or to the cloud. Confirm all is OK. Delete from Source.

We do this with all those poor users that bought MBA's and suddenly discovered 120 GB just isn't going to cut it (and the cost of a HD upgrade in those beasts is very expensive).

All will be fine, but they can no longer view their images on the move.

(also consider ditching Photos, the app is not wonderful).

Yeah that's what I thought ... it sounds like it's an all or nothing move ... I agree about ditching Photos but Mac users are typically a little less savvy than PC users, even extremely basic PC users.

It's nice how Apple products kind of do everything for you, but the problem seems to me that if you don't do it their way they don't want you doing it.

 

[cyabro]

With the new Photos app in Sierra you can turn on iCloud Photo Libraries and then you have an option for the devices to download the full sized originals or to optimize the storage on the device.
The originals are kept in iCloud so they might need to pay for more iCloud storage but that's cheap these days.
With the Optimize storage option you just see the thumbnails on the device and then it will download from iCloud if you want to see the full sized image or video.

 

[TechPJC]

It's nice how Apple products kind of do everything for you,
but the problem seems to me that if you don't do it their way they don't want you doing it.

Nicely put.

 

[carmen617]

If they upgraded from an older version of OSX, and were migrated from iPhoto to Photos, they probably have two photo libraries on their system and only need one. Check and see - if there is an iPhoto library that is about the same size as the Photos library, you can eliminate the issue by simply removing the old iPhoto library from their system. If they have an external drive (which most do, as they often get set up with one to use with Time Machine) I tend to move the old iPhoto library onto the external, just to be on the safe side. I would say that has solved the storage problem on at least 50% of the older Macs I run into with low disk space.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Maybe it's better to put them on dropbox and show them how to selectively sync folders. At least the windows version of dropbox is capable of this...

 

[Mainstay]

With the new Photos app in Sierra you can turn on iCloud Photo Libraries and then you have an option for the devices to download the full sized originals or to optimize the storage on the device.

Trusting Apple with my family photos makes my stomach drop out.

I would never do this for myself and it makes me nervous whenever a customer has done this.

(I'm not not trusting cloud, just not trusting Apple).

 

[sapphirescales]

I love this about Macs. No one wants to carry around an external drive, so I keep all SSD's in stock for Mac and charge a fortune for them. It's either that or they can buy a new Mac, so they'll usually pay about 1/2 as much as a new one in order to upgrade their SSD. I just did 3 of these this week.

 

[Archon Prime]

I love this about Macs. No one wants to carry around an external drive, so I keep all SSD's in stock for Mac and charge a fortune for them. It's either that or they can buy a new Mac, so they'll usually pay about 1/2 as much as a new one in order to upgrade their SSD. I just did 3 of these this week.

That entire sentence makes you sound like a crook.

 

[thecomputerguy]

That entire sentence makes you sound like a crook.

Apple are the crooks ... He still probably charges wayyyyy less than what Apple would for superior service.

For what all of the brain-washed Apple clients spend on a basic mid-range Mac you could buy a full-blown top of the line gaming machine.

 

[cyabro]

Trusting Apple with my family photos makes my stomach drop out.

I would never do this for myself and it makes me nervous whenever a customer has done this.

(I'm not not trusting cloud, just not trusting Apple).

You still should be doing a backup as well.
You can log into iCloud and download all your photos/videos and save them to a USB drive.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Hey so I went out there and SURE ENOUGH @carmen617 ... there was a super old 100GB iPhoto library that had been converted into the new Sierra Photo Library. So I offloaded that onto an external and we'll be erasing that off her main HD so we'll get back 100GB there.

Now the next issue is that she has a 64GB iPhone and of course she has 20k pictures in her phone or about 50GB of photos sitting in her phone. Most all of it has synced to iCloud and Google Photos (she has both)...

How do I clear some space up in her phone? If she goes to delete a photo it says it will remove it from the iCloud photo library across all of her devices .... and it does, we tested it...

I don't see how plugging her phone into her computer will change anything since almost everything is equal now based on iCloud photo sync...

 

[sapphirescales]

That entire sentence makes you sound like a crook.

You've obviously never seen how much Apple's proprietary SSD's cost:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/FASTEST-MOD...330598?hash=item3aed89bea6:g:QN0AAOSwEY9ZkAk3

So $730 plus my markup, plus the cost of transferring all the data and reinstalling the OS...it can easily get to $1,000 to $1,200 depending on the amount of work involved. That's 1/2 the cost of a new Mac.

 

[pcpete]

I love this about Macs. No one wants to carry around an external drive, so I keep all SSD's in stock for Mac and charge a fortune for them. It's either that or they can buy a new Mac, so they'll usually pay about 1/2 as much as a new one in order to upgrade their SSD. I just did 3 of these this week.

Exactly. A clone to a larger ssd is a great value to the customer, and a profitable job to sell

 

[Mainstay]

Exactly. A clone to a larger ssd is a great value to the customer, and a profitable job to sell

Not in my area. People much prefer handing their small capacity MBA to a spouse / kids and buying a new one over upgrading. It may also be that with the dollar conversion to CAD + shipping + duty that they don't like paying $800+ for "just a hard drive".

 

[pcpete]

Not in my area. People much prefer handing their small capacity MBA to a spouse / kids and buying a new one over upgrading. It may also be that with the dollar conversion to CAD + shipping + duty that they don't like paying $800+ for "just a hard drive".

maybe many people don't want to spend the money to upgrade, but it may be a better value to some to pay to upgrade their SSD than to spend $2,100 to buy a second one with a 1tb drive. Besides saving the money, all of their stuff is exactly the same and they can just use it without having to set everything up.

 

[BrianofNazareth]

So $730 plus my markup, plus the cost of transferring all the data and reinstalling the OS...it can easily get to $1,000 to $1,200 depending on the amount of work involved. That's 1/2 the cost of a new Mac.

I must be doing something wrong. I recommend the Transcend Jet Drive 256 GB for ~$160 on Amazon this week https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-Je...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=M76DTEZMAKTGJGP36JJQ
Format it, then move the photo library or Music folder to it & update the links. Done. Total cost ~$250 & takes 1/2 an hour. It fits inside the SD card slot that no one ever uses, nothing to lug around or lose. Bonus: customer does not feel like I have taken advantage of them and may possibly recommend my services to their friends.

 

[Mainstay]

@BrianofNazareth - this is good. I am holding this in reserve for the next MBA that needs that extra bump in space.

 

[sapphirescales]

I must be doing something wrong. I recommend the Transcend Jet Drive 256 GB for ~$160 on Amazon this week https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-Je...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=M76DTEZMAKTGJGP36JJQ
Format it, then move the photo library or Music folder to it & update the links. Done. Total cost ~$250 & takes 1/2 an hour. It fits inside the SD card slot that no one ever uses, nothing to lug around or lose. Bonus: customer does not feel like I have taken advantage of them and may possibly recommend my services to their friends.

Your customers must love slow computers then, and risking their data. You can't compare a slow, crappy little low quality SD card to an SSD that's connected through the PCI-e interface with 4x the capacity and 20x the speed. Only a pizza tech thinks that charging more than bargain basement prices is ripping people off or "taking advantage" of them. Besides, this only helps those who purchased the 128GB version Macbook. Most of my clients want as much space as they can afford so they don't have to upgrade it again and again. Everyone (even clueless end users) know about SD cards. It's not a viable option unless you're either super cheap or can't afford anything else.