Photos stop syncing to my Macbook Air whenever there is less than 10 GB of storage available on my device. (There is plenty of room in iCloud, >1TB.) Is there a way to reduce the amount of space required on the MacBook Air?
[Edited by Moderator]
MacBook Air (M2, 2022)
The MacAir can't operate with so little storage space available. All sorts of things may misbehave. Apple recommends that you have at least 10% of your storage free, and 20% is better. But 25GB free may be problematic. You should do what you can to recover some storage space. With so little storage, you may even have trouble deleting stuff.
You need to off load about 80 GB of files to a portable SSD. This will give you the necessary space to assure optimum system and application performance.
An excellent external SSD that's easy to carry with the laptop is the OWC Envoy Pro Mini.
If budget is a concern this setup is a bit less expensive but still easy to carry with a laptop:
Personally I wouldn't go for anything less than 1 TB. You could put your Photos and Music libraries on it as well as some infrequently used files. Note: if you go that route be sure to test the libraries on the EHD before deleting them from your boot drive.
Just some food for thought.
Have you already enabled "Optimize Mac Storage" on the MacBook Air? If not, try to enable it and wait. Then iCloud Photos does not need to download the high resolution originals of the photos and videos to the local copy of the Photos Library and save storage this way.
Thanks for the tips folks! I'll consider this my problem and not the Mac's. This is my "work" computer and they only give us Macs with 256GB. (My 2TB Air at home doesn't have this problem, of course.)
I don't see any Recommendations at the bottom of Settings/General/Storage, so I'm guessing that I either already turned all of these on, which is a possibility, or our Admin disabled these, somehow. (All my files are in iCloud for sure.)
I'm due for a new machine in January, but realize I may have to clear space and for forget syncing Photos to this one... and probably stop syncing Messages as well, since that is taking up a ton of space. Thanks for letting me know what is "normal" here!
You can run a Photos Library from an external drive, and SSDs can be very fast, very small, and very light weight. You could use one to carry a Library back and forth from home, if you need that, though there are some considerations about unplugging the Library from the computer. But having an external drive attached to the Air might make the transition to the new computer easier…
Are the photos from your iPhone work related? If they are then contact your IT department and let them do their magic to get your photos from your iPhone to your Mac Air.
If the photos are personal get an external SSD as I previously mentioned and move the library to it.
Good idea, Richard. Thanks!
Syncing Photos to a MacBook Air (Local Storage Issue)
