You’ve just plugged in your iPhone or finished a long editing session on your MacBook, and now you’re staring at the screen wondering: where did all those gigabytes actually go? It’s a classic Mac mystery. You see the Photos app icon, you see your beautiful shots in the grid, but if you try to find the actual .jpg or .heic files to back them up to a thumb drive or send them to a friend using something other than AirDrop, they seem to vanish into thin air.
Honestly, macOS is designed to hide this from you. Apple treats your photo library like a black box because they don't want you poking around and accidentally breaking the database that links your metadata to your images. But if you’re trying to free up space or move your collection to an external drive, "somewhere in the cloud" isn't a good enough answer.
The short answer to where are photos stored on MacBook
Basically, your photos live inside a single, massive file called the Photos Library.
By default, you can find this by opening Finder, going to your home folder (the one with your name and the little house icon), and clicking into the Pictures folder. You’ll see a file named Photos Library.photoslibrary.
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That’s it. That’s the "box" where everything is kept.
But here’s the kicker: it’s not actually a file. It’s a package. If you double-click it, it just opens the Photos app. To see the guts of it, you have to right-click (or Control-click) that icon and select Show Package Contents.
Once you’re inside that secret world, look for a folder named originals. If you’re on an older version of macOS (pre-Catalina), it might be called Masters. This is where your actual, unedited high-resolution files are hiding.
Why the folder structure looks like a total mess
If you were expecting to find folders labeled "Summer 2024" or "Birthday Party," you're going to be disappointed. Apple uses a database system that cares about speed, not human readability.
Inside that originals folder, you’ll find a bunch of subfolders named with single numbers or letters like 0, A, F, or 9. Inside those, your photos have been renamed to long strings of gibberish—hexadecimal codes like E6B78B12-4D71-4A22....
It’s annoying, but there’s a reason for it. This unique ID allows macOS to track that photo even if you move it between albums or edit it fifty times. If you manually rename one of these files or move it out of its numbered folder, the Photos app will "lose" the connection. You'll end up with a gray thumbnail and a "File Not Found" error.
The iCloud factor: Are they even on your Mac?
This is where people usually get tripped up. Depending on your settings, your photos might not actually be taking up much space on your MacBook at all.
Go to Photos > Settings > iCloud. You’ll see two options that change everything:
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- Download Originals to this Mac: This means exactly what it says. Every photo you’ve ever taken is stored in full resolution on your hard drive. This is great for offline access but a nightmare for your 256GB SSD.
- Optimize Mac Storage: This is the sneaky one. If your Mac starts running low on space, it offloads the high-res versions to the cloud and keeps tiny, low-resolution "thumbnails" on your machine. When you click a photo to edit it, your Mac quickly downloads the full version from Apple’s servers.
If you have "Optimize" turned on, looking in the originals folder in Finder might show you almost nothing. Your photos are effectively "stored" in a state of flux between your local cache and Apple’s data centers.
Finding photos that aren't in the library
Sometimes, you might have what Apple calls Referenced Files. This happens if you’ve unchecked the box in Settings > General that says "Copy items to the Photos library" before importing stuff.
In this scenario, the Photos app just acts like a window. It shows you the picture, but the actual file stays wherever it was when you imported it—maybe your Desktop or a "Downloads" folder.
This is risky. If you delete that folder on your Desktop, the photo disappears from the Photos app too. Most people should stick to the default "Copy items" setting to keep everything under one roof.
How to actually get your files out
Since the internal folder structure is such a disaster, don't try to copy files directly from the Show Package Contents view. It’s a recipe for a corrupted library.
Instead, use the Export function. Highlight the photos you want in the app, go to File > Export, and choose Export Unmodified Original. This pulls the raw, original file out of the database and lets you save it with its original filename into a folder you can actually understand.
What to do next
If your MacBook is screaming about storage, the best move isn't deleting individual photos. Move the entire Photos Library.photoslibrary file to a fast external SSD. Just drag and drop the whole library file from your Pictures folder to the external drive, then hold the Option key while opening the Photos app to select the new location as your "System Photo Library."
Once you’ve confirmed the library is safe on the external drive, you can delete the one on your MacBook to reclaim massive amounts of space. Just make sure you have a backup—if that external drive dies and you don't use iCloud, your memories go with it.