How to keep album photos while deleting all other photos in iPhoto library?

[yusining]

I have several thousands of photos in iPhoto library. I hand picked several hundreds to several albums. Now I would like to free up my hard drive space by deleting all the photos in iPhoto library, except those in albums. How could I do it?
I have OS X 10.6 snow leopard and iPhoto 11 in my Mac book air. Any help is appreciated.

 

[Pedro Julio]

You could export all of your albums to files on the desktop, delete all of your iphoto photos, and then re-import all of the photos you exported.

Create a new file on the desktop and name it whatever the album is named. Then you just open the album, type command+A to select all then choose "export" from the file menu. You can even choose what format you want to export them as, like jpg, tiff, etc. Repeat for each album, clean house, and re-import.

That's the easiest way I can think of, but maybe someone else has a cleverer solution.

 

[yusining]

Thanks. Before I try this, I would like to understand how re-import work. If I export my albums to different folder, will iPhoto just import them to library altogether, then I have to split them into albums again myself (a little bit painful), or could iPhoto directly import each folder to a separate album?

 

[Pedro Julio]

Once you export each album individually to its own folder on the desktop, you can then import each folder back into iPhoto, one at a time. That will allow you to organize each batch of photos into its own "event," exactly the way you want to have them....which may be different from the way iPhoto would organize them. When you're dealing with hundreds of images things can get crazy if you let iPhoto do the organizing.

 

[iKenny303]

iPhoto Manager is an alternative way

iPhoto Library Manager will allow you to create a new iPhoto Library and copy those Albums to the new iPhoto Library. You can then just delete the old iPhoto Library.

I highly recommend iPhoto Library Manager if you need to manage lots of photos in iPhoto. I find that iPhoto slows down dramatically above about 20,000 pictures and the only way to improve the speed is split the library into multiple smaller Libraries. iPhoto Library Managers allows you to move the pictures, albums, events, and all the metadata (ratings, faces, etc.) between Libraries.

 

[leiren7]

Is it possible to create a smart album with the criteria:
Album is not Any

And then to get the files are not belongs to any album, which you easily delete all the photos are not categorized in any albums.