Granted I didn't pay very meticulous attention after importing my videos and pictures into iVideo and iPhoto, but after looking at my HDD free space before and then later, I feel like iPhoto and iVideo duplicated my libraries somehow. Is this the case? Is this fixable?
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Sorry,
iMovie.. first mac..
If you had your movies and pictures in the folders called Movies and Pictures in Finder, then yes, they were
copied (not moved) from Finder into the iMovie and iPhoto folders. If you had 30gb in Finder and imported those into iPhoto, then your media was "doubled" and there are now two separate copies of the same pics on different parts of your HDD.
The iLife folders are hidden and separate from your media in other places on your computer. The downside is this will double the amount of HDD space your media takes up if you import from your camera into Finder and then import that into iPhoto/iMovie. You can just import straight into the iLife apps, which will prevent the doubling of files. This is convenient and apparently easy to do.
BUT, I still like having control over the files and the way the are stored and etc. I use Automator to batch rename/move media files, so I don't want iPhoto to import directly from my camera. I like importing into the appropriate Finder folders then renaming and sorting, then moving things into iLife apps. Its about control and ease of locating/moving files around for me. For me, having my pics in Pictures in Finder is reassuring in that if I ever want to quit using iPhoto and move my pics to another app, I can just copy my Pictures folder to any storage device, quickly and easily.
I am not aware of any other way of preventing this doubling of storage space used other than importing directly to iLife apps from your camera, and avoiding Finder. Once you are sure iPhoto has all the pics you imported, you could delete the pics from your Pictures folder. Even if you edit photos in iPhoto, it keeps the original intact and you can revert to it, so no worries in that regard.
Hope that helps.
