Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On this episode let me show you how to shrink your iPhoto library size by removing all of
the videos.
One of the really common things I hear about is an iPhoto collection that is huge.
Usually somebody is having trouble finding space on their MacBook drive or they are trying
to move their iPhoto library somewhere else because it is hundreds of gigs in size.
The most common thing that causes this is having lots of videos.
You take videos on your iPhone, you sync with iPhoto and you find out that you've got just
tons of videos on here.
Maybe they are not that important to you or maybe it is not important for you to have
them stored in iPhoto.
I, for one, just like to store photos in iPhoto.
I put videos, which I have much fewer of, in folders in the Finder.
I can easily look through them.
So the problem is that you've got tons of videos in your iPhoto collection.
How do you get rid of them?
Well, it takes several steps.
Finding all your videos can be as easy as doing a search for something like mov.
But that assumes that all your videos have that file extension.
If you are using different cameras and phones and things you may have videos with different
file extensions.
So it is not a reliable way to do it.
A much more reliable way is to create a Smart Album.
So let's create a Smart Album and let's put as the criteria for the Smart Album that the
photo is a movie.
Then we'll call this smart album Videos.
When I do that I get this album here, Smart Album you can see that it has this little
gear there to show you that, called Videos.
Here are all the videos stored in my iPhoto library.
Now typically when you are doing this you may find that there are tons of them in here.
In my example there is just these six.
The first thing that we want to do is to get copies of these out of iPhoto before we delete
them.
So let's create some space here so I can see the desktop.
I'm going to click on the desktop and create a new folder, there, called My Videos and
then simply select all of these, drag them out into here.
Now if I look in this folder I can see that I've got copies of all of them.
So now I can get rid of them from inside iPhoto knowing that I've got them somewhere else.
You would think that deleting these is as simple as selecting one or all of them and
hitting the delete key.
But that doesn't work because we are looking at a Smart Album here.
A Smart Album is like a saved search.
If I'm deleting something from an album I want it removed from the album but kept in
my library.
An album is kind of like a playlist in iTunes or a search in the Finder.
These are just really links to the videos that are in my collection, my library.
So it doesn't make sense to get rid of them because this is still going to be a video
whether I hit the delete key or not and this Smart Album is saying I want to see all videos.
So logically I can't delete from a Smart Album.
So how do I delete them.
One of things I can do is I can flag all of these and using a special function I can delete
them once they are flagged.
I want to make sure that I have nothing else flagged here so that I'm not deleting any
photos I have flagged say doing something I was working in iPhoto previously.
So that is clear.
I'm going to select all of these and I'm going to do Photos and then Flag Photos.
Now they are all flagged and I can look under Flagged to see that they are all there as
well as being here in the album.
Now there is kind of this hidden command here in the Photos menu under Move to Trash.
If I hold down the Control key on my keyboard it will change to Move Flagged to Trash.
I select that and it will ask me to confirm.
Now everything that I have flagged is moved to the trash.
I can look in the Trash now and see there are all my videos as well as something I had
previously placed in the trash.
So now all I have to do is empty the trash and all of those are removed from my iPhoto
library.
So if I take a look here I see that my current iPhoto library is 2.2 GB.
Let's see how much it changes if I delete these.
So I've got these all in the Trash here.
I'm going to do Empty Trash and they are gone.
Now I can quit iPhoto and I can see it dropped a little bit of weight off of there.