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Put iPhoto on a diet

by David Chartier Mar 11th 2007 at 6:00PM

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.

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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...
 

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Thomas Huxley

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.

March 18 2007 at 12:13 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris Barr

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.

March 14 2007 at 12:59 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris Barr

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.

March 14 2007 at 12:08 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jon

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!

March 12 2007 at 7:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Warren Chan

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.

March 12 2007 at 4:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Pepe

This is an excellent idea for "home user" type settings. Thanks.

March 12 2007 at 3:03 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
S.N.A.F.U.

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.

March 12 2007 at 12:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Steve

The cost of hard drive space relative to the idea of throwing out original images makes a tip like this both dangerous and stupid.

March 12 2007 at 12:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
portorikan

I just moved my library over to an external hard drive recently. Freed up a whole lot of space on the internal hard drive.

March 12 2007 at 10:26 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mds

Why does iPhoto duplicate photos after changes instead of just saving the changes made and applying them when necessary? Picasa works this way…

March 12 2007 at 6:56 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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