I am an Aperture refugee - a hobbyist - who has been trying to use Lightroom these past couple of years.

For a no of reasons I’ve not taken to LR and have decided to move to Photos, steadily migrating many photos over the past two months, applying some metadata along the way e.g. Location and Faces.

So I’ve now about 20,000 photos, including 11,000 RAW+JPG pairs in about 1,000 folders, 1,000 albums and have about 1,500 smart albums. My Photos Library is now about 475gb and Photos is unhappy… very unhappy and crashes when I do most anything - creating folders, albums, etc almost every time.

Repairing the Photos Library doesn’t seem to have any affect.

I’d love to know if any others have encountered this problem, and how they overcame it.

The only thing that I can see recommended that might fix things is to do a restore from Time Machine, but before I do this I’d love to hear if people have had ANY success doing this given how long it will take.

Also, I can see that I need to use my Photos Library only to store JPGs and import RAW photos that I want to do some ‘special’ processing and I suspect I’ll save about 250gb in the process. However I can find no sensible way to delete multiple RAW (CR2) files in my Library. Again, has anyone found a way to delete RAW files reasonably efficiently?

(Looking forward to your new Photos course, Joseph, given the meagre documentation to be found on Photos)