When I look at the the about of space that my photos amount to it comes to around 24gb; however, when I look at my iPhoto library info in the finder it says that it is 40gb. Does anybody know why that is, or how to fix it? I'm planning on switching to a MacBook Air soon and I need to budget my disk space.
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Why does my iPhoto library take up so much space?
- Thread starter Mjmar
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When in the Finder, right click on your iPhoto Library and select Show Package Contents. You will see that there is a lot more to the iPhoto Library than your photos, which are stored in the Master folder. If you do a Get Info on the folders you should see where the extra 16GBs are coming from.
Your original photos are left untouched in the iPhoto Library. Any changes you make to the photos in iPhoto creates a copy of the change. This could account for the increase if you've edited photos in any fashion (such as rotating).
One of the biggest space wasters of iPhoto library is that iPod Photo Cache. These are made when you first sync an iPod, iPhone or iPad with that library. They're just copies of your photos in the size that is right for an iOS device. You can safely delete these at any time, they'll just be made again if you sync your device again. To get to them, click on show package contents and you'll see the folder.
Warning: Do not delete or touch anything else in there, as it can screw up your iPhoto, Only delete the iPod Photo Cache folder!
Open up iPhoto and empty the Trash Can in iPhoto. iPhoto seems to have a separate Trash can then the OS X Trash can.
Thank you very much, this helped me get the size down. Would you happen to know what the "previews" folder is that's inside the library contents? It's about 7gb. and I can't figure out what exactly it's for.
I found that iPhoto started to get unstable when my iPhoto library got to about 67 GB. I decided to start over. This time I unchecked "copy photos to iPhoto Library" so I have to keep my originals in one place or iPhoto loses track of them. This creates an extra step with Photostream. When new photos come in, I export them then I re-import them, leaving the originals outside iPhoto library. This has worked well for me and I now have a 15 GB iPhoto Library managing about 200 GB of photos.
I'm not saying you have to do this to make iPhoto work well, but I can say it solved the "instability" issue I was seeing back when I allowed iPhoto to keep its own copies of my photos.
I'm not saying you have to do this to make iPhoto work well, but I can say it solved the "instability" issue I was seeing back when I allowed iPhoto to keep its own copies of my photos.
I'm not sure, in my case it hasn't got all my photos and all the photos that are in there seem to been in portrait mode..
Sorry I just don't know, and when I search around I get conflicting answers, so i wouldn't delete this one just to be safe.