this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
61 points (98.4% liked)

Apple

17329 readers
14 users here now

Welcome

to the largest Apple community on Lemmy. This is the place where we talk about everything Apple, from iOS to the exciting upcoming Apple Vision Pro. Feel free to join the discussion!

Rules:
  1. No NSFW Content
  2. No Hate Speech or Personal Attacks
  3. No Ads / Spamming
    Self promotion is only allowed in the pinned monthly thread

Lemmy Code of Conduct

Communities of Interest:

Apple Hardware
Apple TV
Apple Watch
iPad
iPhone
Mac
Vintage Apple

Apple Software
iOS
iPadOS
macOS
tvOS
watchOS
Shortcuts
Xcode

Community banner courtesy of u/Antsomnia.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Just in case you wondered how many photos you really can have in your Apple Photos library, I can report that I have so far added 1 000 264 Photos and 10 242 Videos without any issues.

I’m fairly impressed and happy about it since all I could find was that it should support up to 100.000 photos, with a few reasoning about the limit being increased to 300.000 on modern hardware.

1 000 264 Photos, 10 242 Videos in Apple Photos

I’m running this on my MacBook Pro M2 Max with 64 GB ram.

Most formats gets converted to HEIC and HEVC on import, which are staggeringly effective compared to their original formats. The whole library file still only takes up 1.7TB, which is much less than expected. The original source on my NAS is around 5.6 TB.

Edit: Maybe I should add that I do not recommend this, and view it as an experiment for now. I’m still importing data. If it’s still stable and performant after a year and some OS updates then I can start recommending it.

all 11 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Holy shit. I have 25k and I thought that was a lot. Almost all raw, but still. A million, compressed or not, is insane.

Edit: barring professional use, but apple photos just doesn't have the management for that.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. More penguin pictures!

[–] Z4rK@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Says the squid! I do not trust your intentions. The location of the penguins will not be revealed.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago
[–] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is there that could limit the size of the library, apart from storage capacity?

[–] richard_wagner@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I also use Apple Photos.

I’ve heard people complain with horror stories about data loss, and I hope that doesn’t happen to me or you, but so far the service is very convenient.

[–] itsyourmom@artemis.camp 1 points 1 year ago

From the pictures I can see… you shoot some beautiful pictures! Hope all goes well and you don’t have any problems! Love the sky and rocks and the penguins Ofc! 😁

[–] mbirth@lemmy.mbirth.uk 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do you convert imported media? I.e. what tool and/or settings do you use - especially for videos?

For photos, I use the macOS-included sips tool which doesn't seem to need any tweaking. Just sips -s format heic *.jpg --out ./ does the trick.

For videos I'm using ff-Works with h.265 CRF 22 output, keeping dimensions and framerate.

[–] Z4rK@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I don’t do anything on import, I let Apple Photos handle it. I have not actually checked that it gets converted, but I cannot imagine anything else that can explain the reduction on size.

[–] maccentric@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Have you noticed any discrepancies between what’s on you drive and what’s in iCloud? I’ve had clients with much smaller libraries that would have say 50,000 on iCloud but 50,100 on their Mac. How do you figure out what’s missing? AFAIK there’s no way to tell Photos to resync with iCloud.