Avid users of iPhoto who also count their megs and gigs typically notice that the darling iLife app can quickly gobble up a good chunk of the hard drive. One practice that is sure to help inflate the size of your library is editing images. As it turns out, whenever you make edits and save, iPhoto duplicates the image, creating a backup; hence the usefulness of that 'Revert to Original' option. One problem with this system is that all these duplicates can pile up fast if you're an avid iPhoto editor - but thanks to some simple instructions in this MacRumors forum thread, you can put iPhoto on a diet. If you don't want to read through all the posts, Adriaan Tijsseling, the developer of ecto, endo and 1001 (an excellent Flickr client), has whittled out the meat to help get you on your way. Adriaan's post contains the simple commands to run in Terminal (along with an explanation of what is going on) that will effectively remove all the original copies of any images you have edited in iPhoto. While this obviously means you'll lose the ability to use that 'Revert' option (in case you try it, you won't break iPhoto; it's just that nothing happens), this could be a useful trick for anyone trying to reclaim every last byte of free space.Put iPhoto on a diet
Avid users of iPhoto who also count their megs and gigs typically notice that the darling iLife app can quickly gobble up a good chunk of the hard drive. One practice that is sure to help inflate the size of your library is editing images. As it turns out, whenever you make edits and save, iPhoto duplicates the image, creating a backup; hence the usefulness of that 'Revert to Original' option. One problem with this system is that all these duplicates can pile up fast if you're an avid iPhoto editor - but thanks to some simple instructions in this MacRumors forum thread, you can put iPhoto on a diet. If you don't want to read through all the posts, Adriaan Tijsseling, the developer of ecto, endo and 1001 (an excellent Flickr client), has whittled out the meat to help get you on your way. Adriaan's post contains the simple commands to run in Terminal (along with an explanation of what is going on) that will effectively remove all the original copies of any images you have edited in iPhoto. While this obviously means you'll lose the ability to use that 'Revert' option (in case you try it, you won't break iPhoto; it's just that nothing happens), this could be a useful trick for anyone trying to reclaim every last byte of free space.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-11-2007 @ 6:40PM
Dexter Ang said...
Why not use something like iPhoto Diet... available at http://www.rhythmiccanvas.com/software/iphotodiet/. It has a GUI so it'll definitely be simpler to use for average folks than doing something in the Terminal. Note that the forum post in the link above mentions iPhoto Diet isn't compatible with iPhoto 6, but iPhoto Diet has since been updated to support iPhoto 6.
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3-11-2007 @ 7:25PM
randal said...
wow an iLife diet and changing the terminal? that sounds like heavy stuff... Maybe this would be a good new topic for one of those mac vs pc commercials, they can both be on diets and stuff.
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3-11-2007 @ 10:47PM
jordan said...
Hmmm, never paid attention to this. Would be nice if they had an option to delete backups copies that were older than a certain amount.
jo
http://www.cerealinsider.com
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3-12-2007 @ 1:27AM
dcartguy said...
I just used iPhoto Diet that Dexter recommended, and was able to recover 3.5 GB of space.
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3-12-2007 @ 6:56AM
mds said...
Why does iPhoto duplicate photos after changes instead of just saving the changes made and applying them when necessary? Picasa works this way…
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3-12-2007 @ 12:11PM
Steve said...
The cost of hard drive space relative to the idea of throwing out original images makes a tip like this both dangerous and stupid.
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3-12-2007 @ 12:18PM
S.N.A.F.U. said...
This is the dumbest idea I've ever heard, I'm not dumping my original RAW files for any reason! I chose "edit in external editor" to work on a file which is then transfered to an external drive for storage.
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3-12-2007 @ 12:44PM
portorikan said...
I just moved my library over to an external hard drive recently. Freed up a whole lot of space on the internal hard drive.
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3-12-2007 @ 5:12PM
Pepe said...
This is an excellent idea for "home user" type settings. Thanks.
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3-12-2007 @ 5:38PM
Warren Chan said...
Does anyone know how change the path of the modified file to an external drive?
I've moved my originals file to an external drive and that works nicely as iPhoto doesn't need to import these files to its folder on the system disk. However, iPhoto continues to store the modified files on the system disk and I'm running out of room.
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3-12-2007 @ 8:14PM
Jon said...
Quit iPhoto
Move the library where you want to have it
Start iPhoto while holding alt
Navigate to the new library directory
Press Ok.
That's it!
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3-14-2007 @ 12:08AM
Chris Barr said...
Wow, I used "iPhoto Diet" and it uselessly wasted an entire day for me. Luckily I was smart enough to make a backup before I ran the program though.
I started iPhoto Diet, and it took about 8 hours to process all 7000+ photos I have. I'm not even kidding, 8 hours! I couldn't even use my computer during this time since it constantly switched bewteen making iPhoto and iPhoto Diet the active application.
All in all it saved me 900MB, but for every one of the photos it "fixed" it just gave me a grey question mark in iPhoto. Thanks for nothing.
Once I revert to my backup, I believe I will try the terminal command out, it seems like it may work better. But I've still got my backup just in case.
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3-14-2007 @ 1:00AM
Chris Barr said...
Sorry for a double post, but I just tried the command line version of this, and it completed within 30 seconds and saved me 1.59GB of space. I wish I had just done that first. It would have freed up a lot of space very quickly, and would have allowed me to work on things that needed to be done all day long.
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3-18-2007 @ 12:14AM
Thomas Huxley said...
Is there a way to put iTunes on a diet too? In iTunes it says I have 13GB of music but the iTunes folder on my hdd takes up about 20GB.
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