Macbook Pro hard drive nearly full

[MaidinDevon]

Help!

I am not very knowledgeable about computers, especially my Macbook. The hard drive is nearly full, mostly with photos (88gb) and "other". I cant see what "other" is, or if i can delete things. I am on Sierra, if that helps. I have backed up to an external hard drive, and I also have google photos, so have cloud storage I presume. I have recently bought a Canon EOS DSLR, and am shooting in raw, so suspect that is using a lot of memory, but I don't know.

Am I safe to delete the photos from the hard drive? Would you recommend updating to the latest, I think it is Mojave? It won't install, as not enough memory. Originally I had 250gb, but down to less than 10gb. I don't find Apple easy or intuitive, but confess I have never spent time learning it.
My preferred learning style appears to be pragmatic, learn enough to do what I want and not bother about the rest.

Any help or advice gratefully received.

Karen

 

[scotjimland]

You have all photos on an external hard drive and a on the Google photos cloud

Belt and braces, I would do a second backup of all photos to a 128GB USB memory stick .

Examlple>>>
SANDISK Cruzer Blade USB Memory Stick - 128 GB, Black
Broken Link Removed

now you can delete all the photos on the Mac, then install Mojave.

I have it running on an iMac and MacBook Pro.. no problems with it..

A more expensive solution would be a second external hard drive preferably SSD , 1TB .. that would give you a huge amount of storage

 

[hilldweller]

Any help or advice gratefully received.

Karen

Never rely on a single backup, too risky.

>>> am shooting in raw
a bit chilly this time of year as well as being huge.

 

[Cavs]

If you use the Mac's Photos app with iCloud storage, there is an option to reduce the size of photos stored on the device while retaining full-size versions in the cloud:

 

[DBK]

If you just have the normal Google Photos it won't have the full sized images stored on it as it just stores a smaller version. You can get 1TB of storage from Google and it will automatically store full sized versions of all your images and all your other files too, but it costs £10 a month.

The USB stick above looks very good value but you might want to buy two so you have a backup of the backup.

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[MikeD]

You don't say what EOS camera you have but RAW photo's can easily be 30meg each. Some EOS would be nearer 50meg.

Mac also (I think) save's every deleted photo and a memory of the photo's prior to editing.

So your memory can be taken up very quickly. I need to clear my MacBook pro out every year.

The last few months of photo's is 46 GB of data on my Mac.

I back up to two external drives and only keep the last few months of recent pictures on the PC.

 

[Mark McG]

Try using Omni disk sweeper to check what’s filling up your disk space https://www.omnigroup.com/more/

 

[mitzimad]

Never rely on a single backup, too risky.

>>> am shooting in raw
a bit chilly this time of year as well as being huge.

chilly and huge you boaster

 

[robnchris]

Get yourself a 2tb external hard drive and save everything to that.
If you are using any photoshop older than CC then don't upload Mojave, it won't support it.

 

[MattR]

My Nikon can take Raw & JPG. If yours does the same, I would go through the photos and delete the images & raw versions that you will not use. I would then delete the raw versions of images that you might want to use sometime but are not worth editing. I would only keep the raw versions of images that have potential of being useful.

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