Multiple Copies of Photos in iPhoto Directories?

[~Shard~]

I was just doing some clean up on my Mac and was questioning the way iPhoto saves my photos. In my iPhoto Library directory I have the individual "Year/Month/Day" folder breakdowns, leading to my photos, then I also have the "Albums directory" which shows the exact same photos. I also have a "Thumbnails" folder, with the photos displayed again (although I realize these are smaller in size), and then in the case of some photos which I've edited/cropped/whatever, I have yet another folder with "Originals" in it.

Although I have a ton of HD space to spare, I'm just curious why iPhoto seems to want to make duplicates of my photos all over the place - kinda messy to have so many copies of the same photo everywhere. Or are these just links to 1 copy of the photo? I like keeping my system as clean as possible, and it seems unnecessary to have 3 or 4 versions of the same photo hanging out in different directories, taking up HD space, especially when they are 1 MB photos in some cases.

Any thoughts? Or is this just the way it is?

 

[7on]

Everytime you edit a picture, iPhoto puts the "original" into an Originals folder. It's safe to delete them. Just do a search in your iPhoto Library for the word "Originals" and delete all that shows up. Should free up a lot of space.

This is what makes the "Revert to Original" work in iPhoto's menu bar.

I wished iPhoto had a pref to delete the originals after like a week or so. That'd be nifty.

Also if you rotate any files too their originals are saved.


The thumbs are there so iPhoto doesn't take a long time to load like it was in iPhoto 2. Then you have the full size photos. And in the Albums folder, they're just Aliases to the photos in the year/month/day directories therefore taking up hardly any space at all. Though it'd probably work better if it were XML like iTunes. Oh well,

 

[~Shard~]

Great, thanks for clearing all that up. Things aren't quite as bad as I thought then. I'll do some housekeeping on my originals then and that should do it.

Thanks!

 

[mcadam]

I'm quite happy to get it explained in this way too... But this is really the main reason i don't use iphoto at all - it freaked me out, the way and where it saved my pics.

It's slightly annoying w itunes too, but for those i'd always just use the files w that app anyway.

could be really nice if you had the option of deciding where to put your stuff yourself in these cases...?!

A