Dan Moren, writing for Six Colors:
One of the more interesting features of Photos for Mac is its ability to not store my entire photo library on my Mac’s drive. It does this by syncing the entire library to iCloud Photo Library and then dynamically loading and unloading photos as you use it.
This is a nice feature to have if your photo library is big and your hard drive space is limited. The post is definitely worth reading, just so you understand the basics and can turn to this approach if it ever becomes necessary.
My only concern is what to do if something goes wrong. If some (or most) of your photos are stored in the cloud, how do you recover them if things go south. As is, I manage all my photos on a Mac with plenty of drive space. I back up that Mac regularly, then occasionally back up that backup to an external drive I keep off site.
Losing my photos would be devastating to me. How easy is it to recover from a scenario where my photos are split between storage mechanisms?
I really like this feature, but I consider it a way to have access to my photos across all of my devices, rather than a backup solution per se. It is comforting to know that I have the photos available in the cloud, but I certainly wouldn’t want my photos to ONLY be available in the cloud. I have no plans to stop doing what I’m doing with regard to backups, which is pretty similar to what Dave describes.
I can’t trust iCloud and use both OneDrive and DropBox for cloud image “storage”. I do use iCloud for cross device access though, but it’s not my primary warehouse.
Luckily I have enough storage on my Mac so I can set it to have all the photos locally. Therefore they get backed up with my Time Machine and other backups. All my iOS devices are set to manage via iCloud and the optimization of space they do is awesome. I suspect that is the reason my 16GB iPhone still seems like it has plenty of space for me to work with (even taking video, as long as I move the video off to the Mac fully in order to edit it) while so many tech bloggers complain 16GB isn’t enough.
I can’t imagine not having enough local drive space. And I rarely keep new photos on my phone after loading them into iPhoto.
I have a client with 120GBs or so of photos and her MacBook has a 128GB SSD. So, there is an external drive keeping her Photos file, and it is managed with iCloud so she can see all the photos and get to them via iCloud. I guess, ostensibly, the external drive is still local storage, but not when she takes her MacBook somewhere and leaves that drive behind. 🙂
Until I’m forced to retire my Mac Pro tower, this will be an abstract problem for me. Not entirely looking forward to the iMac that’ll probably replace it, with relatively minimal internal storage. Trying to hold that off as long as possible. 🙂