Mac people - help needed please

[MattW]

I recently (and stupidly) imported a load of video (about 190Gb) from a recent trip onto my MacBook Pro and filled up the hard drive (500 Gb SSD). So I tried to delete these videos which in itself was a mare as 'Photos' seems to hide them away in its own 'moments' library.

Anyway after an hour's digging, there are no videos showing in Photos or the movies folder and the trash is empty but the Mac still reports 175Gb of video files when I look at 'Storage'.

Can anyone give me clue as to where the hell I can find these videos? I wondered whether perhaps TimeMachine has them saved somewhere for a backup so I could undelete them?

I've also posted this in the photography section.

Thanks
Matt

 

[BrendanS]

Depending on what model you have, try the iPhoto storage folder, usually where mine go if I import. If you know the file extension they were saved under, you could also search for that (search for .avi for example). When I have a lot big files to import I move them to Google Drive straight away and them delete from the laptop for space.

 

[MattW]

Thanks for the advice.
I downloaded a disk inventory app and it showed that even though there were no videos showing in 'moments' (I'd deleted them) the the 'Photos' library was about 160 GB. As I don't use Photos I just deleted the library and emptied the trash. This transferred the space to 'backups' so I turned off TimeMachine local snapshots from the command line and re-enabled it which cleared the backup snapshot and restored the space taken up by these phantom video files. I'm now back to the 200Gb free space I had before I stupidly imported all my trip video.

Confirms my thinking that the new 'Photos' app is junk - the way it stores stuff in 'moments' and completely obfuscates the file structure is far from helpful.

I'll close this thread now but leave the one in 'Photography' open for future reference.