1. Photos Maximum Library Size Limit
2. How Big Can Photos Library Be
3. Apple Photos Maximum Library Size
4. Is There A Limit To Iphoto Library Size

iCloud Photos lets you have your picture of a cake and shoot a video of eating it, too. You can create a library of images and movies that’s far larger than the storage space available on any linked iOS or macOS device without losing anything you’ve captured.

Apple accomplishes this by treating iCloud as the “truth.” It stores the original, high-resolution versions of your media in your iCloud storage, while providing the option to store only “optimized” or thumbnail versions that take up a fraction of the space on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

You can choose to download the full-scale originals, but you obviously need to have enough storage to hold the library.

3 March 2021: Maximum file upload size updated to 250 GB. 16 September 2020: Updated info about OneNote notebooks to clarify that the 2GB file size limit applies to SharePoint as well as OneDrive. 31 August 2020: Updated the invalid or blocked file types guidance about.PST files when Known Folder Move is turned on. ICloud Photos lets you have your picture of a cake and shoot a video of eating it, too. You can create a library of images and movies that’s far larger than the storage space available on any.

If you don’t have an iOS device with the capacity or a Mac with a big enough internal or always-connected external drive, you have to rely entirely on Apple retaining the high-resolution originals. About 18 months ago, I wrote a column aptly titled, “Why you should not rely on iCloud Photo Library as your only media backup.” I meant it then and now.

The gist is that it’s risky to trust someone else, anyone else—even Apple—with the only backup of your stuff. Apple tends to encourage that these days with iCloud. And the company has been trustworthy with your data. But I still think we should always want and expect to have at least one—but typically multiple—complete copies of our important data in our possession or fully under our control.

Is there a way to work around this? Not easily. Apple didn’t plan for this scenario. There’s no option at iCloud.com to “download all media from iCloud,” and iCloud as a service doesn’t offer an interface for third-party backup services, like Backblaze or Carbonite, to extract or regularly update such a backup, either.

While Photos for macOS lets you maintain multiple Photos libraries, only one library at a time can be designated the System Photo Library, and only the System Photo Library can sync with iCloud Photos.

The obvious solution would be to use an external drive to hold your Photos library. Apple makes it quite easy to move your library and point Photos to it, including syncing to iCloud Photos from that migrated library. (See “How to move an Apple Photos for OS X library to an external drive.” The column is from 2015, but the instructions remain accurate.)

However, that depends on that external volume being available whenever you want to access your Photos library. (And iCloud Photos sync requires the library be attached to a Mac to keep it up to date.)

The obvious idea would be to create a backup of the optimized library on an external drive that you connect from time to time to your Mac and set as the System Photo Library. Then you would seemingly just enable Download Originals to This Mac in Photos > Preferences > iCloud. When all the images and video have downloaded, you’d then swap back to your internal library, and make sure the iCloud setting was switched back to Optimize Mac Storage.

However, it’s inadvisable. While iCloud Photos should keep track of which media and metadata is the most recent—such as after you add titles and keywords to a bunch of photos or organize them into albums—because Photos and iCloud Photos isn’t designed to switch among libraries, it’s unclear what will happen. It’s a difficult thing to test, because you need to check over time, too, to see whether problems appear.

Whenever I’ve attempted to test this with a massive library I maintain, either by enabling and disabling iCloud Photos or switching between optimized and full-resolution settings, iCloud forces a full sync. Even with the high-speed connection I have, it can take from hours to days to complete, and I’m never quite sure whether the final state has changed from where it was before I swapped settings.

The answer ultimately lies with Apple, which could let iCloud Photos users designate multiple libraries (a la Time Machine), a backup library, or other strategies. For now, you either need to trust in Apple, switch to an external drive, or reduce the images you sync with iCloud Photos.

This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Jennifer.

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Learn about the service limits in SharePoint for Microsoft 365.

Limits by plan

¹Learn how to find the total and available storage for your organization. You can purchase an unlimited amount of additional SharePoint storage. See Add storage space for your subscription.
² We recommend monitoring the Recycle Bin and emptying it regularly. The storage space it uses is part of the organization's total storage limit.
³ If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription and an Office 365 Extra File Storage add-on, the storage amounts are added.
⁴ This is the storage limit for a single site (previously called 'site collection'), not the amount of storage provided for each site. This limit applies to all types of sites, including Office 365 group-connected team sites and OneDrive. SharePoint admins can manually set lower storage limits.
⁵ Frontline Workers can't administer SharePoint sites.
⁶ Not including the OneDrive created for each licensed user.
⁷ If you have more than 500,000 users, contact a Microsoft representative.

Service limits for all plans

Items in lists and libraries

A list can have up to 30 million items and a library can have up to 30 million files and folders. When a list, library, or folder contains more than 100,000 items, you can't break permissions inheritance on the list, library, or folder. Nor can you re-inherit permissions on it. However, you can still break inheritance on the individual items within that list, library, or folder, up to the maximum number of unique permissions in the list or library (see the next section). To learn more about other restrictions for viewing large lists, see Manage large lists and libraries in Office 365.

Unique security scopes per list or library

For large lists, design to have as few unique permissions as possible and remain below 5,000 in total.

File size and file path length

• 250 GB - File upload limit. Applies to each individual file uploaded to Microsoft Teams Files tab, SharePoint document libraries, OneDrive folders, and Yammer conversations.

• 250 MB - File attached to a list item. Applies to Microsoft Lists and SharePoint lists - both based on same lists platform.

To learn more about restrictions and limits when using the new OneDrive sync app (OneDrive.exe), see Invalid file names and file types.

Moving and copying across sites

Copying/Moving multiple files in a single operation has three requirements:

• No more than 100 GB total file size
• No more than 30,000 files
• Each file must be less than 15 GB

Sync

For optimum performance, we recommend storing no more than 300,000 files in a single OneDrive or team site library. Although SharePoint Online can store 30 million documents per library, for optimum performance we recommend syncing no more than 300,000 files across all document libraries. Additionally, the same performance issues can occur if you have 300,000 items or more across all libraries you are syncing, even if you are not syncing all items in those libraries. If you use the previous OneDrive for Business sync client (Groove.exe), the sync limit per library is 20,000 items (including 5,000 items per team site).

Versions

50,000 major versions and 511 minor versions.

SharePoint groups

A user can belong to 5,000 groups per site (site collection), and each group can have up to 5,000 users. You can have up to 10,000 groups per site (site collection).

Note

For Azure AD group limits, see Azure AD service limits and restrictions as such limits can impact public and private group sites membership management.

Managed metadata

Photos Maximum Library Size Limit

1 million total terms, having a total of 2 million term labels and 1 million term properties (these limits are for global & site-level terms combined). 1,000 global term sets and 1,000 global groups.

Overall site metadata

1000 GB per site (metadata rarely reaches this size).

Subsites

How Big Can Photos Library Be

2,000 per site (site collection). We recommend creating sites and organizing them into hubs instead of creating subsites. If you do use subsites, we recommend limiting their number (especially on heavily trafficked sites).

Apple Photos Maximum Library Size

Note

Your organization is limited to 2,000 hub sites. You might not need a hub site for every function, and it's important to do some planning before you create hubs. For more information, please visit Planning your SharePoint hub sites.

SharePoint hosted applications

20,000 instances per organization.

Is There A Limit To Iphoto Library Size

Users

2 million per site collection.

Note

There is no distinct limit to the number of guests you can invite to SharePoint sites. For more information about external sharing, see External sharing overview.

See also