How-to-resolve-iCloud-is-full

It’s irritating to get those “iCloud storage is full” alerts. But what’s worse is that you can’t sort the Apple Photos library by file size to find your largest photos or videos. That would make it easy to decide which ones to keep, and which to either offload or delete. Without knowing this, how can you rationalize your iCloud storage? Seems like a sneaky omission to make you buy more storage!

If you’re a Mac or iPhone user, and you run out of disk space, you can select Optimize Mac (or iPhone) Storage setting. This pushes your original files into iCloud, while keeping smaller, preview-sized versions on the Mac or iPhone. This is a convenient, but your iCloud storage gets filled up quickly. While iCloud plans are quite affordable for storage up to 200GB, they get pretty expensive after that. Also, once you exceed 200 GB storage, the next higher tier is 2 TB – there’s nothing in between! You can’t be blamed for feeling shortchanged when you have to pay for 2 TB of cloud storage when you only need 205 GB, or even paying for 200 GB when you really need just 205 GB.

PhotoSort is a nifty little tool that can help solve this problem. It sorts your Photos library by file size and image quality, letting you identify large files in your Photos library. This makes it easy to decide which items to offload and archive, and which ones to delete.

Here’s how it works: Download PhotoSort from the Mac App Store. Launch it, and the app detects your Photos library (If it can’t, you can do it yourself). Click Sort, and you will see three of your largest, and three of your best photos or videos. You can click View > Largest to see a list of the 30 largest files.

Home screen of PhotoSort app for Mac, showing photos sorted by file size and quality

To sort the entire library, you’ll need to upgrade to the app’s paid version. The lifetime license costs just $4.99, so go ahead and buy it.

PhotoSort will now create two albums in the Photos app – SizeSort and QualitySort. SizeSort arranges your entire library by file size, and QualitySort does it based on aesthetic quality. You can further adjust the filters through Settings.

Now that you know which are your heavyweight files, you can export them to your Mac or an external drive, and delete them from Photos. The AI-powered QualitySort is also impressive – not only does it surface the best photographs you’ve taken, it also clusters all the meh stuff at the bottom. So you have a second way to clean up the clutter and keep your photo collection lean and manageable.

App Initio Limited has been making photo & video-related utility apps for iOS and MacOS since 2012. Download PhotoSort today, and also check out our other apps.

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