Since Diane’s daughter-in-law has only a 256GB drive in her Mac, she has been running with optimized images with iCloud Photo Library. If you’ve got a good Internet connection, it’s kind of the best of both worlds – all of your full-sized images are available on-demand but you don’t pay for local storage for all that data. It also has some other magic sauce that is supposed to keep your most recent and most recently accessed images in full size for quick retrieval. The optimized images option gives you thumbnails of every photo in your library, and when you select a thumbnail, it downloads the full-sized image. You can choose to have full-sized images download to your device or you can choose optimized images. If you’re not intimately familiar with iCloud Photo Library, let me explain the two options. Her daughter-in-law had a 256GB MacBook Air, and as often happens, her Photos Library wouldn’t fit on her internal disk. The problem to be solved was one I hadn’t given much thought to, but which I suspect many people face.

She wanted to bounce ideas off of someone so she brought me in with the “phone a friend” option. My friend Diane was visiting her granddaughter, and, as one does, she was giving tech support to her daughter-in-law.

How to backup mac photos to icloud