Saturday, November 29, 2008

Some tips on how to cleanup iPhoto

I am not a power Macbook user when it comes to the i[fill-in-the-Apple-application-here] anything. I am a simple user with over 5 years of pictures on my Macbook. So when I noticed the iPhoto application was really getting slow and that all my disk space was about gone (80GB!), it was time to look deeper into this.

Just a few tips here, but they radically cleaned up my iPhoto disk waste:
  1. Empty the trash - seems like a no-brainer, but I was unaware that iPhoto had it's own trash bin. Just follow the menu entry to clean out those deleted pictures: iPhoto -> Empty Trash. This got me over 9 GB of disk space back.
  2. iPhoto Diet - this is a very nice tool which will allow you to scan your entire library of pictures for more iPhoto nonsense (chuff, duplicates, and even more stuff you don't want to know about). 
This second tip took some time as I have something like 3500 plus photos. But patience pays off and I now have gotten rid of an amazing amount of crap in iPhoto. It even performs better now.