What's best option to free up HD space?

I would not use time machine to do what you describe. I don't think you quite understand how time machine works.

Think of it as snapshots taken at a given interval. Say you backup right now, it'll make a copy of things as they are right now.

Now, if you go ahead and delete your photos, if you ever want to see them again, you'll have to enter the time machine, remember the date you deleted them, restore them to your hard drive. Only after you've done all these steps will you be able to view them again.

Your quickest and best bet would be to simply copy-paste them into an external hard drive them delete them. You'll get much, much quicker and efficient access to them should you want them.

 

Freeing up space in Mac OS X and OS X

Btw, copying data from one HDD to another HDD and then deleting the data from the source HDD is not backing up.
Backing up is creating another additional copy without deleting the original after the copy process, thus at least two sets of the same data exist, preferably not within the same room.

 

iPhoto backups

My 60-GB iPhoto library already seems excessive and here you have one almost 3x larger

As others have said, your stated plan for using Time Machine will actually lose your photos and videos, so don't do it that way.

What I did to back them up was create separate iPhoto libraries archives, by year, which is a rather tedious process of copying main library, opening copy, deleting anything NOT in a given year, manually clean up leftover preview image caches... then repeat for each year.

Then, with copies of all archives safely backed up onto multiple disks including offsite, on the original library I rate the photos. Anything not rated at least 3 stars I delete from the original or "working" library.

 

I would consider upgrading your hard drive. You can sell your current hard drive for $25-30 on ebay and buy a 1TB drive for around $60.

Minimal cost for something you need.

 

How do you access the "visual" disk info as in the image in post #1 ?

Barney

 

Click on  → About This Mac → More Info → Storage

 

Many thanks.

Barney