iPhoto sort by resolution?

February 15, 2006 5:15 PM

Is there a way to get iPhoto to sort pictures by resolution/size? An external utility?

I had an old digital camera that would write 320x240 pictures to a memory stick the same time it took the regular size photos. Now (as then, but I didn't know) I have no use for them, but iphoto has taken them all in anyway. They display as duplicates.

I've used spotlight to delete the actual files, but they still stubbornly appear in the iPhoto library. I can't find a "refresh library" option or a way to sort by resolution to round them all up and delete them. Smart albums seem to stop just short of corraling by size or resolution.

Also, any "find duplicates" functionality, like in iTunes?

posted by ontic to computers & internet (8 comments total)

iPhoto Diet will do this, but don't risk using it with iPhoto 6 just yet.
posted by nathan_teske at 5:20 PM on February 15, 2006

if you are running OS X 10.4.x, you can do this using Spotlight. Bring up a search window. Select your iPhoto library as the source. Specify "images" as one criteria. Create a second criteria and scroll down to "other..." You will now see a hellaciously long list of criteria. Go down to "pixel width". Add that. Then do the same for "pixel height". Enter the appropriate values. Sit back and wait.

When Spotlight is done finding them, select them all and drag to the trash.
posted by adamrice at 5:25 PM on February 15, 2006

I whipped this together in Automator. It'll make a new photo album containing all your low-res pictures. You can just click on the album, select all, and hit option-delete.

Look out, though, because this will choose all your low-res movies and cameraphone pics too, if you have any.
posted by designbot at 5:39 PM on February 15, 2006

Designbot's got it - I was just playing with this, too, and was puzzled as to why it was putting multiple instances of the same photo in the resulting library. All were originals with no edits. Odd.
posted by nathan_teske at 5:48 PM on February 15, 2006

Mine did that, too. Dunno why, but it should still get the photos you want in the same place together.
posted by designbot at 5:55 PM on February 15, 2006

adamrice, thanks for the great tips on using Spotlight to clean out iPhoto. I had close to the three thousand small dupes (after many months of hunting them down by hand) left over that are now going away.
posted by fenriq at 10:02 PM on February 15, 2006

adamrice -- but this will just get the photos out of the directory, right? I've done this and they still show up in iPhoto.
posted by ontic at 7:04 AM on February 16, 2006

If you've taken them out of the directory, you should have taken them out of iPhoto.

I'm not completely knowledgeable about iPhoto. I suppose it is possible that you could move a picture out of that directory and iPhoto would still find it (if it is referencing the file ID and not the file path), but if you delete the picture, it really should be gone. I think.

Another thing to bear in mind is that iPhoto creates a looooot of thumbnails. You can delete these and it will create them anew. These probably wouldn't have the 320x240 dimension though (on my machine, anyhow, they're 240x180). If you really want to get medieval on them, you could use Spotlight to find all the folders called "thumbs" inside your iPhoto Library folder and delete those--but iPhoto will just rebuild them, slowly.

I also see there are a number of really big, monolithic files in the iPhoto Library folder. These seem to be caches of pictures. I don't know what exactly would happen if you deleted them (the safest thing to do would be to try this out under a dummy account), and I don't know of a way to force iPhoto to re-scan the library as a way of updating itself.
posted by adamrice at 7:31 AM on February 16, 2006