Find the Largest Files In the Mac Photos App

If you need to figure out which items in your Mac Photos Library are taking up the most space, you can't do it in the Photos app. But you can create a simple Shortcut to examine the photos and videos in your library and create an album showing you the largest items.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Want to find the largest items in your Photos Library? I'll show you how to do it. 
A frustrating thing missing from the Photos App on your Mac is the ability to find the largest item. Sometimes if your drive is getting full or maybe your iCloud Storage you want to find what is taking up all this space. Maybe you've got some very large videos in your Photos Library. Maybe you've got a bunch of raw photos that you forgot about. It would be really useful to be able to sort by size. But you can't! If you go into All Photos here you can go to View and there's Sort. But you can only sort by date. There's no way to even use a Smart Album to do it. You can't do anything here to say find items that are larger than a certain size.
Now if you want to do something really quick you can, for instance, look under Media Types and just see your videos. Those are likely your largest items here. You can also look at things like Live Photos or Panoramas or perhaps first, or even raw photos here to see those. So you can figure somethings out. But you can't really get a picture of what are the largest items in your Photos Library. To make it even more frustrating you can actually tell the size of an item by selecting a photo like this and click here to get info. It will show the size. I can even go to another item here and I can see the sizes here. So you can see the size. There's just no way to sort or find the largest ones. 
I know some people resort to third party apps for this or tied down into the package that is the Photos Library to actually look at the files there. But, you can actually just create a very simple shortcut to do this. 
So, I'm going to start here in the Shortcuts App and create a New Shortcut. I'm going to call this Find Largest Photo's Items. The first thing I want to add here is something for the Photos App. I'll search for Photos. There it is. Find Photos. I'm going to double click  on that and it will add this. I want it to find All Photos. Next I'm going to search here for Filter. I can filter files. Now you may think these are items in the Photos Library, not files. But the Filter Files action works on more than just files. So I'm going to double click to add that. It's going to immediately link to the previous action there and it is going to try to filter the Photos that come out of the first action. But I'm not actually going to filter them at all. I just want access to the Sort By. I'm going to Sort By Size. But wait! There was sort by up here in Find Photos. But if I look at this there's no size here. I can sort by width, and height, and date, and all sorts of things. But I can't sort by the size of the item. So, instead the first action is just going to get everything. The second action is going to Sort By and, guess what. You can sort by file size here. 
So I can sort by file size. I can do Order: Biggest First. I'm going to limit. I'm not going to return a list of all of my photos. I'm not interested in most of them. I just want to know which ones are the largest. So I'm going to set a limit to 25. I want to find the 25 largest items coming out of my Photos Library. 
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That is actually going to return a result if I just run it here in Shortcuts. But I can't do too much with that result. I'll fund it here and you can see it works pretty quickly and the first item there is a video. If I look at the list here I can see there's a video, there's a photo, another photo. These are going to be the largest items sorted with the largest first. But I can't do much with them right here. I want to be able to see them in the Photos App so I know what I can, maybe, archive or get rid of. 
So I'm going to look for Album here. You can see I can create a Photo Album. I'm going to double click to add that. I'm going to create a Photo Album named Largest Items with the results here. Now, every time you run this it's going to try to create the same photo album with the same name. So I'm going to do something a little clever here. I'm going to put a space and then parentheses and I'm going to Control Click right there and insert a variable. I'm going to insert the current date. I'm going to set this to Date Format: Short, Time Format: Short. You can see the example here. So it is going to put in parentheses this. Which means every time I run this it will name the album Largest Items and then with the current date and then I will put a close parenthesis after it. So that way if I forget to clear it out it won't just add these items to the previous one. 
Now I'm going to run this and it's not going to take that long to run because it is a sample photos library and it is not that big. But I did run this on my regular Photos Library with more than 40,000 items and it took about 10 minutes to run. So this isn't the kind of thing where you can expect instant results. You want to set this up, let it run, go for a coffee break, or come back the next day and expect to find the results. 
So it is finished now and you can see it will output the list any way. But I don't really care about that. I'm going to Hide Shortcuts and go back to Photos. If I look in Photos here and I look under Albums I can see there's the album I created. Largest Items. It put the 25 items, 24 photos and 1 video, here in this album. It named it just like we expected. 
Now if I were to select an item here and get info on it I can see the size. So I can see this is 23.6MB. The next one is also pretty big, 18.8 MB. It happens to be a raw photo. You can see that here. The next one is 17.5 MB. It is not a raw photo but you can see it is a panorama. So it is a lot of pixels. As a matter of fact 13,000 pixels across. So it did a really good job. As a matter of fact if you look at the sizes here that's 17.5, 16.6. If I use the right arrow to go to the next one, 16, I can keep going with the right arrow and notice that actually took the sort order and built the album that way. So not only am I getting the 25 largest items but I can tell what the largest one is, second largest, and all of that. I actually get a sorted list here in this album or my largest things. Remember this is just an album. So it is kind of like a playlist. I haven't added anything at all to my Photos Library. I just added this album, or playlist, of items that are already in my library so I can just see them grouped together. 
Now I can decide what I want to do. For instance, I can select an item here and I can drag it out or do a File, and then Export and export the original for it. I can select several of them. Maybe these three panos can be saved to some files and not stored in my Library anymore. I can do that with Export the unmodified originals. Then once I do I can delete it. Maybe there is one that I think, well I don't need it at all. Maybe I don't need this one. If I just press Delete to delete it, it will actually just remove it from the album. So it is still in my Library. But if I go to Image and down to the bottom you can see I've got Delete is Remove one photos from album. But Command Delete, or selecting this item here, actually deletes the photo. If I select that now it is actually gone out of my library completely. Well, it is actually here in Recently Deleted but it will eventually get out of there, or I can empty Recently Deleted later on. 
Now you can modify this to only look at certain types of items. So I can add a filter here and I can say I want the Media Type is: and I can set it to Image or Video. So if I only want to see the largest images I can select this and now my results will only be images. This video won't be included. Or if I know that the videos are going to be the big ones and the ones I want to get rid of I can switch to Video and now I can see the 25 largest videos and get them in size order so I can deal with them. Or, if you want, you can do something like Date Taken and have it be, say, 3 years. So if you've got a lot of recent items that you may want to deal with but you know anything older than 3 years is going to be fine then you can do it this way. This will reduce the number of photos that come in from the first action making it easier for the second action to sort them and your results then won't necessarily be the largest items but be the largest items from the last 3 years. 
So there is a lot here that you can do to further customize this. Note you don't have to add this as Pinned in Menu Bar or as a Quick Action or in the Services Menu or anything like that. This is a good shortcut to just have in your Shortcuts App and then just run it from here when you need it. So if you want to find the largest items in your Photos Library I hope this helps you out. In addition to that I hope you learn a few shortcut skills. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 15 Responses to “Find the Largest Files In the Mac Photos App”

Joel D Canfield

1 month ago

I *always* forget the Shortcuts app. I do lots in AppleScript and Raycast, and all kinds of shell scripting automation, but some stuff is just so much easier using the native app. This is something I've needed to do for ages but really had no clue how to do it.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Nick

Thanks Gary, that's a clever solution, but it does beg the question why Apple did not built that functionality within the Photos app. Given that "Size" is another parameter of the photo, like date etc, I would not think it should be that far fetched to include it. It would be another step closer to a complete photo management app.

Peter Eckle

Where/how do I find the shirt cuts app?

Justine Murdy

Why might this not work? I've set up the short cut as you explain in the video but I am not seeing the album.

Jim Pyle

Gary,

I've got a problem that you've apparently already solved. This shortcut always sorts my System Photo Library, no matter which library I actually have open.

Vlodi

This does not work if majority of your photos are in icloud and not offline available?

Gary Rosenzweig

Peter: The Shortcuts app is part of macOS. You already have it.

Justine: Sorry, I don't know where you could be going wrong. Check each thing carefully.

Vlodi: Not sure what you mean. It should work when using iCloud Photos in "Optimize" mode. Does it not for you? Are you saying that you are online or disconnected when trying it?

Cedu

Excellent video. very useful to me. thanks Gary !

Dear Gary, I followed your instructions to a TEE. The only change I made to your example was from 25 to 50. I changed it to 25 now and it worked! Thanks, Justine

Jan de Bloois

It works like a charm! Only second later I saw the generated Playlist (Album) even on my iPhone, thank to my iCloud. Thank you, Gary!

Bob Hunter

I keep getting the error: PHPhotosErrorDomain error 3300

Bob: A search for that error on the Web turned up a few things. Maybe it is because a shared album is involved and you can't add a photo shared by someone else to you into your own album? Do the search and see what else strikes a bell for you and your situation.

Find the Largest Files In the Mac Photos App

Comments: 15 Responses to “Find the Largest Files In the Mac Photos App”

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