~/Pictures Bloated Size I am planning on backing up my pictures

When I got to ~/Pictures it shows 168.57GB Size and then two libraries iPhoto and photos as shown below.




I thought these were just links so total of all my pictures should be just around approx 90GB but not 168.57.

So now if I backup ~/Pictures to an external Drive is it going to consume 168.57GB and have duplicates?

Please suggest if I am thinking incorrectly.
The image files (the jpgs) exist only once but are hard linked into both libraries. As the Finder doesn't have an (easy) way to identify the hard linking, calculating folder size on ~/Pictures counts these files twice.

Hard links work within one disk volume only, so if you copy data to a Cloud drive or to Windows, you will end up having two seperate files (and really use 168 GB in your case).