Give Me Some Space
Over time iPhoto gathers more and more images, occupying an increasingly large portion of your disk. When you delete photos from Albums they remain in the iPhoto Library, an attempt to protect you from disaster.
This Snippet is for users who allow iPhoto to copy their images into its Library. We’ll cover a couple nifty ways to zap photos from your disk.
If you are somewhat advanced and have iPhoto reference your photos somewhere else, this doesn’t apply to you. You can change this setting in the Preferences panel.
This Snippet also shows how to install a Scripts icon on your Menu bar. For more information on these Scripts take a gander on the Apple site. There are some interesting details, including how to assign keyboard shortcuts to these scripts.
20. December 2006 at 10:19 pm :
Read your tutorial about iPhoto, “Give Me Some Space”, which I found vey interesting. When i got to the part about seting up scripts on the menu bar, i ran into an issue on both of my macs. I did not have the iphoto script on either machine. Running iPhoto 6 and OS 10.4.8. Where is that script? I went to the Apple website about scripts & never could find a place to download it. Ran around in circles on the website trying to find it. What’s the secret? Where is it?
don
9. January 2007 at 1:31 am :
Ditto the comment made by Don Pick. Also have been unable to find an “iPhoto Scripts Folder” anywhere. Please advise as to where it exists. Thanks.
D-B
9. January 2007 at 1:51 am :
Ditto the comment made by Don Pick. Finally found an “iPhoto Scripts Folder” at this Apple URL: http://www.apple.com/applescript/iphoto/
Thanks for the very useful Snippet.
D-B
9. January 2007 at 2:19 am :
Thanks for posting that D-B. I should have done so when I emailed the link to Don. It was hard to find!!
24. April 2007 at 2:44 am :
this was great help.
i’ve been looking for the answer to this for sometime.
BUT
now that i’ve emptied the iphoto trash
and restarted my computer
shouldn’t my hardrive register as having more space available?
it looks as if i have the identical amount of space as before.
THANK YOU for your help.
-b
24. April 2007 at 2:59 am :
Off the top of my head I can’t remember if you need to empty the trash in your Dock too. You can open the trash in the Dock and see if there’s any iPhoto stuff in there.
Do you let iPhoto copy your images into its library - or did you change the default behavior and have it reference your photos in their existing folders?
And you’re more than welcome - thanks for visiting the site!
24. April 2007 at 6:22 pm :
i let iphoto copy them into the library.
i actually did empty the trash in my dock
and shut down and restarted.
but unfortunately
still no difference.
-b
24. April 2007 at 8:52 pm :
I would run a controlled experiment, something like this:
You want to use df because that will tell you if you’re truly getting the space back. du will tell you if a specific folder has changed its size.
When you’re done, use the Option key when starting iPhoto to go back to your old library.
I ran a little experiment and my library folder shrunk back down. I didn’t check overall disk space though. I didn’t have to empty the Dock trash, it was empty when I started and empty when I finished.