I was trying to clear up space on my MBP's HD today when I discovered that my 5000 some odd pictures in iPhoto that are supposed to take up 14.3GB according to iPhoto actually take up a whopping 55GB when I use get info on the pictures folder. What is my best course of figuring out what has gone wrong here and how I can reclaim this valuable disk space?
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iPhoto using a ridiculous ammount of space for my photos.
- Thread starter magiic
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How many photo edits and versions do you have? iPhoto keeps a copy of all of them including the originals.
I figured that would be the issue as I edit a lot of stuff. My photos are also 3-5MB for all the recent ones taken on my XTi (the pictures I've done most of the editing on). How do I delete it so there is just the final copy of each photo?
If you've edited all of your Photos, you can go into the iPhoto Library package by control+click or right clicking the package and selecting "Show Package Contents." Copy the Modified folder onto your Desktop, and create a new library. Import the modified folder into the new library and then you can delete the old one. Things are more complex of course if you have a mix of original and modified items...
maybe keep the iphoto library on an external drive? if thats possible, since you can do that with itunes libraries.
Yes, that can be done- by copying the entire library external and then holding down the Option key when iPhoto is started up next time. That will give you an opportunity to locate the desired library on the external, after which the whole library on the internal could be erased.
External drive isn't an option. Also some of them edited some are not. I am currently travelling around New Zealand with my Macbook Pro I'm also using a 250GB external drive for time machine backups so I cant move the pics to the external as that would defeat the purpose. Is there really no easy work around here?
oh i see what you mean now... the editing and stuff.. there has to be a way i woudl think of delete riginals and only keep edited ones... i just don't know how, i am having the same problem as you, i have been thinking about aperture or lightroom but they both do teh same as iphoto in this sense,
See my post above, you can export the most recent version and reimport into a new library. It's not a smooth way of doing it, but it will work.
It sounds pretty logical. I'm kind of dissapointed I couldn't of come up with that on my own
lolYou may lose things like ratings and keywords, depends on whether iPhoto embeds them or not ...
Does iPhoto truly keep a copy over EVERY edit? So if one day i go in and fix red eye and another day I crop the picture, does iPhoto really keep 3 versions of the picture? The original and the 2 edited versions? Why wouldn't iPhoto just keep the final copy of the edit and delete the versions in between?
Seems like a huge waste of space to me.
Yes iPhoto does save a copy of each version. So after doing all of those changes you would have 3 copies.
Aperture does not save a copy of each photo after you make changes to them. It only save the metadata, keeps track of the changes you have made.