I found that ~/Library/Photos/Syndication.photoslibrary was being backed up the other day, noticed in the log file. Finding precious little information about it on the ol’ internet. Possibly related to iCloud shared libraries, or maybe Messages media. Does anyone here have any info about? I’m looking for ways to free up boot drive space, and this file is several GB. Not huge at all compared to my regular Photo libraries, but still enough to make me want to figure out how it could affect me if I tried to (re)move it.
Let me start by saying I do not have specific knowledge of the purpose of that particular file. However, if it’s of any help, mine (Monterey 12.1) is at ~/Library/Photos/Libraries/Syndication.photoslibrary, and is 103MB, or roughly 0.2% of the size of my Photos Library. It “looks” like one of those files that would get recreated if found missing, but I wouldn’t try that without assured backups of both that file and my Photos Library, just in case.
Ah, you’re right on the location for me also. I missed typing the “Libraries” folder in the path. When trying to free up disk space on the boot drive, it’s big undocumented files like this which make me a bit crazy.
coming in a year late, because I’ve just been looking at the files inside this bundle myself, I’d say they are media files shared via iMessages and similar.
Mine has lots of pictures that I recognise as having either shared with others, or had shared with me. It’d be nice to be able to turn them off on a machine by machine basis though. I’m going to try turning off what is called “Automatic Sharing” in the Messages preferences (under ‘Shared with You’) on one of my Macs, and see what happens.