Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's look at ways of dealing with large iPhoto libraries.
I occasionally get emails from people having trouble with their iPhoto library.
They usually come to the conclusion, very quickly, that their iPhoto library is too
big.
But, iPhoto can hold a ton of photos.
Some say it can hold as many as a quarter of a million photos.
So if you've got less than that then chances are there are some other steps you can take
to speed things up and make things run a little smoother.
One thing is people don't realize that iPhoto has a separate trash from the rest of your
system.
If you go and select an image and then trash it, hit the delete key, it seems to be gone
but it is actually still stored in your iPhoto library.
You can find it by going to Trash here.
It will show you the photos you have recently thrown in the trash.
So it is still stored there.
You are not going to get any space back by just doing that.
This is kind of a safety measure, just like the regular trash, so if you accidentally
throw something away you can come back to it and recover it.
If you want to really empty the trash and clear out space from your library you go to
iPhoto and Empty iPhoto Trash.
That will get rid of these.
Of course you want to make sure, absolutely sure, that you really want to delete them
because there is really no way to get them back after doing that.
Another thing you may want to do is to try to rebuild the iPhoto library.
Your iPhoto library may be very old going back years, several version of iPhoto.
All sorts of things could have happened during that time to create a little more bulk in
there than there should be.
Things in there that hasn't been cleaned up.
Rebuilding it solves a lot of problems.
So the way to do that is first you quit iPhoto.
Then you launch iPhoto again but when launching hold down the Command and the Option key.
Keep them held down.
Then when it launches you will see that you get this dialogue box here that gives you
options for rebuilding your library.
There is all sorts of things you can do.
If you know you are having a problem with your thumbnails or somethings like that then
you can go to one of these.
But the ultimate one is to rebuild the database.
Before doing this, one of the things that I would do is to make sure you are backed
up using Time Machine backup of course.
So you want to make sure that that has recently run in the last few minutes.
Also you can go to your iPhoto library here.
It is usually in your Pictures folder, unless you have put it somewhere else.
You can make a copy of it.
You can put it on an external drive, put it somewhere else on your drive if you have plenty
of space.
Just make a duplicate of this so that if something goes wrong that you've got your photos.
Nothing is really going to go wrong.
It is very rare.
But your photos are too valuable to take that chance.
So returning to iPhoto select Rebuild Database and hit rebuild.
The process may take some time so maybe do that just before lunch or when you are done
using your computer for the evening.
Now another thing people try to do sometimes is to split their iPhoto library into multiple
pieces.
I don't recommend this because the whole point of having all your photos in one place is
to be able to find them.
If I want to find pictures of my daughter's third birthday I don't have to search my iPhoto
library before I realize that was before a certain year, that means I have to open a
different iPhoto library.
So I don't like the idea of doing that.
But say if you use iPhoto for work and you do projects, you know say you do photo shoots
and things like that, stuff you don't want to be in the same place as everything else
then you could start new libraries.
The way to deal with new libraries is to quit iPhoto.
You launch iPhoto again but this time just holding down the Option key.
This time you will get this dialogue box here where you can actually go in and create a
new iPhoto library.
Once you have multiple iPhoto libraries you can choose which library you want to open
up.
So say you do want to split up your iPhoto library.
Well, how would you do that?
You go to where your iPhoto Library is located and you can simply duplicate it, make a copy
of it.
Then you go into one and delete some photos from that one and you go into the second one
and you delete some photos from that one.
For instance if you have photos from 2011 and 2012 you can have one copy where you delete
everything from 2012 and another copy where you delete everything from 2011.
Now you've got two separate libraries, each with one year.
You want to make sure you empty the trash in each one and also maybe rebuild the library
when you are done since you are deleting so many photos from it.
But it is one way to do it.
There is also some third party software you can search for.
I've never tried it but it will divide up an iPhoto library.
You can also use Aperture for this.
I will look at handling this kind of thing in Aperture in a future episode.
Another thing you may want to do is to get the videos out of your iPhoto collection.
A lot of time I hear about huge collections and it turns out most of it is video files
which are much larger than photos.
You take videos on your iPhone and digital camera, they come into iPhoto and they take
up a lot of space.
A lot of people would rather store them in a folder somewhere else and name them properly,
things like that.
So you can do that using Image Capture taking videos off of your iPhone and digital camera
first.
Then sync with iPhoto to get the photos imported into there.
But if you already have videos in iPhoto you can find them easily by creating a Smart Album
and then setting it to be things like Filename contains and then putting all these extensions
that are typically used for videos.
So I'm going to do just three here but you can do more if it turns out your camera is
generating files with a different name.
Just match any of the following conditions.
Hit okay and you can see here it grabs two videos there.
I can take these videos and I can drag and drop them to a folder here in the Finder to
export them very easily.
So I can export them all from there.
Then I can delete them from my iPhoto collection.
If you want to trash these what you need to do is to select them all from there and then
Move to Trash is greyed out but if you hold down the Option key then you can actually
move these to the trash and delete them.
So there are a few ways to speed up iPhoto if you are having trouble.
A few things you should try and definitely try everything before deciding to split up
your iPhoto library.
Of course, another option is to move to Aperture which I will be looking at in a future episode.
I hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.