My Photos library is 270G after I cleaned out duplicates and old videos that no longer play in the app. 
Looks like my 200G iCloud space I’m sharing with my family (80G available) isn’t going to cut it
See if you can play them with VLC. Of course, you may no longer want to keep them in Photos if they can’t be played in-app.
Find them after Right Click to Show in Finder and then convert the file with Handbrake or Permute and then import the new file into Photos. If you are able, keep the creation date from the original file in case you need to retag it.
Save the converted file to a different folder and don’t mess with it in Finder. After you reimport the new file and verify it works, delete the original from Photos.
I, conservationist that I am, would archive a copy of the original to an external archive drive.
Hope you find some enjoyable memories
I moved them out of photos to a different folder. They all still play fine in VLC
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I wonder if this is a related issue. If not, @ace, obviously feel free to break out into its own thread.
I don’t use iCloud photos. I sync my Mac Photos with my iPhone via USB and Finder whenever I want to move a bunch of camera roll photos over to my Mac’s library. The Mac’s albums (with photos and videos) also sync back to the “On My Mac” section of iPhone Photos. All good so far. The problem is that whenever the Mac actually has to push new photos to the phone (after I import to the Mac the originals in camera roll get deleted), I get a cryptic error message about certain .mov files not being able to be synced. All I get to do is acknowledge by pressing OK. The file name is just a big number salad. I don’t recognize any of these files so not being able to play them on the iPhone is unlikely to be a problem, but it would be nice to figure out which files these actually are and to remove them so the error message doesn’t come up each time I sync interrupting what is already a lengthy sync (480 Mbps 
). Ironically, when I just do a simple Finder search, it claims there are no .mov files anywhere near my Photos Library. 
Any ideas how I might be able to track down the culprits without resorting to huge effort?
I tend to use iTunes to manage videos rather than Photos. But, of course, I am still running Mojave on that Mac. A big advantage is that iTunes happily works with files on external drives so most of my videos are stored there.
It also supports Homesharing so the videos can be viewed on Apple TV, iPads etc.
I have Macbook running Ventura and it seems to support similar functionality (my Apple TV recognises it as a Homesharing source) but I haven’t played with it.
I do have to be careful to backup the external drive from time to time as my normal Mac backups don’t do this.
Regarding the title of this thread, I have found Handbrake quite versatile for converting old videos, including reducing file sizes.
A multimedia manager such as Plex might be an option to consider if you’re willing to invest in an external hard drive to store your files (I’m not sure if it works with a cloud-based library).
Handbrake is an excellent (free) choice for format conversion, with or without a MM manager.
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