Reclaiming hard disk space from iPhoto...

Posted April 17, 2007 3:07 PM.

A very quick microtip that I've just discovered since buying my new camera. When I'm taking pictures, I have the camera set to take a number of photos in a row. I do this particularly when there are low light conditions as then hopefully you can grab one shot where someone isn't moving or your hands aren't shaking too much from the DTs. The result of this is that when I open up iPhoto I get ten or fifteen versions of any particular shot, most of which are almost identical. I sort through them by hand, comparing them as appropriate and deleting those that are blurry or too dark to use.

However, I have just discovered that deleting something from the Library in iPhoto isn't like deleting something from the rest of your system or even like deleting songs from iTunes. If you delete a photo it doesn't get removed when you empty your main trash, nor does it prompt you about whether or not to delete the original file sitting on your computer anywhere. In fact, if iPhoto is keeping your originals, it will even keep a copy of photos you've deleted, clogging up your hard disk, pretty much in perpetuity.

The only way to get rid of the originals of photos you've deleted (which in my case can be ten or more two to four megabyte files for each photo I actually keep) is to explicitly use iPhotos inbuilt 'Empty Trash' feature, concealed nicely under the main iPhoto menu. This is a completely non-standard feature and nicely concealed. As a result it's almost totally undiscoverable and means that if you've used iPhoto for a while you may very well be building up a completely unnecessary clog of large files. In my case when I finally found this feature, iPhoto asked me whether or not I wanted to delete over two thousand items taking up around eight to ten gigabytes of hard disk space. Needless to say, yes.