MacBook Pro storage question

[Winona]

Hi. When I import photos I put them in albums. I noticed the computer has the same pictures in “imported” and “ photos” categories. Does this mean 1 picture is using 3x the storage space? And I assume I need to delete from “ photos” which will delete it from the computer? Thanks!

 

[TWX]

Just a guess, but the computer is probably categorizing the image for you, and storing only one copy while using some kind of tagging system to assign it the label of "imported" and the label of "photos" while also keeping whatever label you've applied through your own categorization.

You can of course check this in a few ways, you can edit or delete a photo and see if it changes globally or only locally to a particular category.

You might also be able to use Apple-I to get-info, which might tell you the full path on the filesystem to where the file is stored. Do this for each place you see the file, and see if they all point to the same spot or not.

Now, to really bake your noodle, Apple as a UNIX variant also supports things called hard-links and symbolic-links, which establish pointer-references to the same actual disk cluster(s) in multiple locations. In reality, all files on UNIX systems are hard-links, they are an abstraction layer between the inode clusters and the filesystem presented to the user. Think of real estate, where tracts, subdivisions, and parcels are mapped to street addresses, and where a property by its location could potentially have multiple possible street addresses, either possibly being 209 W, 211 W, 213 W, etc, or could have a north-south address if it's on a corner instead of just an east-west address, or could even have an address on a street on the opposite side if the property spans between to roads. In most UNIX variants, deleting a hard-link doesn't delete the inode cluster unless it's the last or only hard-link to the cluster.

Symbolic-links function more like a "Shortcut" in FAT/FAT32/NTFS, but much more integrated with the filesystem itself than Microsoft's Shortcuts function.

Then there are application-specific methods of tracking files on the filesystem, and defining labels based on extended characteristics of the files. This is what I bet they're doing with the photos on your Mac, they've confirmed that they are photos, they've confirmed that they're imported (versus system files, downloaded, created locally, etc) and they've followed your assignment for the labeling.

 

[Joseph Hanna]

Are you asking about the application on Mac’s called “Photo”? If so then yes. Once a photo is pulled into the application which is called “Photo” it’s copied into a proprietary storage hierarchy which is specific and unique for the application itself. At that point you’ll then have two copies (the original and the copy). If you’re then confident to delete the original picture the singular copy will only live in the Mac Photo application hierarchy folder.

Finally it’s important to note that the “imported” photo folder seen within the application itself is merely a pointer and not a 2nd/3rd copy.

PS: I don’t wanna go too far here since I’m not sure yet you’re even talkin’ about Photo but I would submit while I don’t use Photo for editing, this I do find it an amazing application for a post Lightroom librarian and viewer!