FEBRUARY 2020 MACWORLD 127After setting Photos to optimized
storage, import batches of data and wait for
them to upload. You can follow upload
progress at the bottom of the Photos
window in the Photos view. You
may have to bump the scroll
a little to hit the very bottom
where the library size is
shown and the iCloud
upload status displays.
Once each chunk has
uploaded, you should be
able to import another
tranche. As new media is
imported, Photos should
automatically delete the local full-
resolution copy of your image and video as
long as it’s been uploaded to iCloud.
The thumbnails and previews take up
some space, but it’s typically so much less
than the originals that with tens of
gigabytes available on your Mac, you
should be able to store a 600GB library
that contains mostly high-resolution
images and videos. You could run into
trouble only if you have a massive number
of relatively low-resolution photos, but it’s
unlikely you would with a collection of
images that require that much storage.
Now, I’ve argued previously that iCloud
Photos shouldn’t be your sole backup (go.
macworld.com/icph). If you only use
optimized storage on all your devices,
that’s what iCloud turns out to be! You may
instead want to import photos onto an
external drive first, then import from there
to Photos, so that you always have a
second local copy, even if the
organization of the images into
albums or folders isn’t the
same in both places.
You can also use a
technique I described a
while back, too, and
occasionally do a
time-consuming but
useful full-resolution
download using an external
drive (go.macworld.com/flrs)
connected to your Mac.
Apple hasn’t yet fully embraced cloud
storage as a “one tool in the arsenal”
approach. While it does store data with
redundancy, making its own multiple
geographically dispersed backups of your
data, it still doesn’t provide a simple way to
download all your stuff directly from iCloud.HOW TO OPEN ITEMS IN THE
ENCLOSING FOLDER DIRECTLY
FROM A SPOTLIGHT SEARCH
IN MACOS
One might think after many years of Spotlight
search being in macOS that there would be
no new tricks. But a colleague on Twitter
asked a reasonable question and many
people chimed in with the same query: When
viewing a list of results in a Spotlight search in