OSX Photos says Your iCloud Storage is Full, but it's not...

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Level 1

4 points

OSX Photos says Your iCloud Storage is Full, but it's not...

Hi. I decided to move from Google Photos to Apple Photos.

I download everything from Google, moved it into Photos on OSX fine. It then tried to move the data to iCloud, and got stalled part way through. I had 50GB, so I upgraded it to a 200GB. But Photos still won't sync anymore and Photos reports "Your iCloud Storage is Full". I've tried:

Rebooted the laptop, nothing changed
Uploaded directly to iCloud from my laptop (worked fine)
Took a new photo on my phone, it synced to iCloud, but not to my laptop.

Background:

OSX Sequioa 15.5
No pending updates
iCloud has ~150GB free
Laptop has ~400GB free
The only thing reporting an issue is Photos

Also, clicking "Manage Storage" next to the "Your iCloud Storage is Full" message does nothing.

Image below. Any ideas?

[Edited by Moderator]

Posted on Jul 18, 2025 12:36 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 18, 2025 08:53 AM in response to lkaswhfd

Where is your Photos Library located? Is it in the Pictures folder on your internal drive, or somewhere else? For instance, the Photos Library can't work if its in iCloud Drive.

What I see is not a message about syncing Photos, but rather it says "Restore from iCloud Paused." What are you restoring?

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Answer 2

lkaswhfd Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 19, 2025 02:38 AM in response to Richard.Taylor

Pictures are on the internal drive.

I wasn't restoring anything, but you got me wondering. It looks like it was trying to backup my phone at the same time as the photo's were syncing. That borking out with the storage seems to have blocked my photo sync.

I deleted the backup and did a fresh backup. Photo sync still stuffed.

I unchecked iCloud Photos "Synch this Mac" on the laptop, then checked it again. Everything seems to be syncing now. So yay, I suppose...

Thanks for the question that led to the solution!

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