iPhoto Management

January 13, 2015 8:43 AM

I use iPhoto purely to keep track of my iPhone photos and video...it's just easier. I take tons of images, and with the 6's bigger file sizes now my library has ballooned to over 1/5 of my HD. I do lots of dslr work, and I need as much HD space as possible for my actual photo work, not my phone snapshots. What are some solutions you've concocted to manage how much room this shitty app gobbles? Compression? Is there an option somewhere to archive by year? What's the best answer?
posted by nevercalm to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

If it were me, I'd start a new external drive and keep the iPhoto library there, or vice versa, the DSLR files.
posted by humboldt32 at 9:12 AM on January 13, 2015

I recently bought PhotoSweeper [App Store link] and have used it over the last few weeks.

It's done a really good job of cleaning up my library by eliminating duplicates and photos that are so similar I don't need to keep both. I don't know if this is part of your problem, but if it is, PhotoSweeper is a godsend.
posted by veggieboy at 9:14 AM on January 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

I do this for my work, and we make a separate iPhoto libary for each year then backup and store on an external drive.
posted by greta simone at 9:53 AM on January 13, 2015

I moved my iPhoto library to an external drive (a NAS) and even with everything connected via ethernet cables, it's painfully slow accessing my photos and pretty much grinds my system down to a crawl when iPhoto is open. I vaguely recall iPhoto not playing well with external drives, but perhaps that was with older versions and things have changed, or it's just a personal problem on my part. Either way, I'm interested to see what others will say in this thread.
posted by homesickness at 9:54 AM on January 13, 2015

I can confirm that placing the iPhoto library on an external NAS (QNAP) connected via wifi or ethernet is painfully slow. I've tried building a new library multiple times to no avail. Apple's preferred solution seems to be uploading photos to iCloud (and purchasing additional cloud storage), or buying one of their storage devices...

It seems irresponsible and dangerous to store all of your pictures locally.

I'll be following this thread as well to find out how other people have solved this problem.
posted by sk8ingdom at 11:00 AM on January 13, 2015

Response by poster: I keep two separate copies for backup, and even just copying the library onto and off of a thunderbolt drive is painfully, painfully slow. Tho I have noticed that it'll say "copying x gb will take y minutes," where Y never winds up actually taking as long as they project.
posted by nevercalm at 11:41 AM on January 13, 2015

If you are running Yosemite, and you can hold off a couple of months, Apple is due to replace iPhoto with a completely new Photos app soon. The new app probably won't be better than iPhoto with disk space, but it will inevitably be different, and you might want to wait and see how the new app behaves before you make a decision.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 12:40 PM on January 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

What I've done with Aperture on a too-small MacBook Air is the same as Greta Simone's method above: I create a new library every year. Roll the old libraries off onto external disks (plural) and open them only when needed.
posted by fedward at 12:55 PM on January 13, 2015

Archive by time to external hard drives... and routinely, I backup to Flickr and Amazon Prime so that I have "quick" access to the photos (or thumbnails) to find stuff.... Not the best solution, but it kinda works. (having off-site cloud storage is a good thing, too, imo)
posted by mhh5 at 2:22 PM on January 13, 2015