How Phanfare uses your local disk
From Phanfare Support
Note: Phanfare never moves or modifies your original photos and videos.
This is a technical article that goes into some detail on the inner workings of Phanfare. Read on only if you're interested about what goes on under the hood.
Your local disk cache
When you import photos and videos into the Phanfare desktop application, the program copies the images and videos into a temporary cache on your computer. So if you create an album with 100 megabytes of photos, Phanfare Photo's cache will immediately grow by 100 megabytes. That growth is only temporary.
Phanfare first resizes your photos locally and sends web-sized versions to your online album. We also capture the first frame of each video as a still image and upload that. This is why your web albums are able to appear so quickly.
Next we send the full-size original versions of the videos and photos. Once full-size original photos are uploaded, we delete them from the local cache, leaving only the web-sized version in your cache. However, videos stay in your cache so that you don't have to wait to download them to launch them from the desktop application.
Web-sized vesions are about 10% of the size of fullsize images, so if you import 100MB of photos, you would expect the Phanfare cache to be about 10MB.
Logging in from another computer
When you log in to Phanfare from a computer other than the one used for importing, Phanfare Photo will bring down web-sized versions of your images into its local cache. You can then edit and arrange these photos as you normally would.
Manually maintaining your cache
If your cache is taking up too much of your disk space, you can move it to another drive that has more space available or you can attempt to clean it up manually.
To move the cache, select Options from the Tools menu and choose the Caches menu. Click the Browse button in the Disk Cache Location section and select the drive or folder where you'd like to store the cache. The cache will be moved the next time you launch the application. If the cache is large, the move may take a while.
If the cache is moved to a removable device or network drive that's subsequently unavailable, Phanfare will recreate the cache in the default location.
If you delete Phanfare's caches entirely or uninstall and reinstall the software, Phanfare will download web-sized images to your computer, but the fullsize images will not be brought back down. To force full-size images or videos to be downloaded, you must explicitly retrieve the full-size version.