HT204476: Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries
Learn about Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture librariesQ: Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries. Which library do I use to delete old pictu ... Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries. Which library do I use to delete old pictures? If I delete old pictures in iPhotos do they appear in Photos and vice versa? more
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Jan 16, 2016 1:02 PM in response to lagomezby léonie,★HelpfulIf you migrated an iPhoto Library to Photos and want to free storage, you have to delete the photos from both libraries.
The storage for hard-linked photos will only be released, after the last linked file has been deleted. If you don't use the iPhoto Library any longer, move it to a backup drive. Then you only need to delete the photos from your new Photos library.
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Feb 26, 2016 4:20 AM in response to léonieby iangreen,Thanks! So the best thing to do would be to delete both iPhoto.app from the Applications folder and iPhoto Library.photolibrary from the Pictures folder, otherwise deletions in Photos would not really free up the space of the photos, as they will still be referenced by the hard links in the iPhoto Library.
At least then we can save the space taken up by the iPhoto app itself, and maybe a little space taken by the hard links.
My Photos Library is three times the size of my iPhoto Library. I hope that only reflects the number of photos I have actually added since Photos was released, and not inefficiency in the database.
This certainly is the kind of thing that can confuse users. Even though the concepts of symbolic and hard links existed in Mac before Windows, and they are used in both, its still not obvious. Afterall, when you Get Info on the file iPhoto Library.photolibrary it does not say anything about being any kind of link. However, if you Show Package Contents on the iPhoto Library it behaves like a folder, the same way doing that on an App does.
I'm going to document this whole thing in order to remove uncertainty for those who follow!
Then, you will notice that the Data, Modified and Originals folders are actually shortcuts to another location. I followed the Originals folder shortcut and found it went into the Masters folder, still in the iPhoto Library hierarchy, and had no dates after April 10th, 2015, when I last added photos in iPhoto.
Drilling all the way through to a photo and Get Info on it and it STILL looks just like a file, in the iPhoto Library, because it is not a symbolic link, but a hard link, and as I said before, this is a technical concept that is hard for Apple to explain to their users.
Trying to find the same file inside the Photos Library is difficult though. I found two files with the same name but they were actually different photos, with different dates and different EXIF data! (Thanks EXIF data again, for removing uncertainty!) Before I delete the old database I will search for this photo in Photos and prove that it will not be lost when I delete iPhoto and its database/library.
Weird, autocomplete worked for text that is in the original photo in the search box in Photos, but zero photos were returned! I eventually found the file! I want to prove that I have not lost any EXIF information before I do this delete! Unfortunately, Preview is showing a lot more EXIF information thatn I can see by Get Info in Photos. Trying to show the original file in Finder is proving extremely frustrating! All I can do is to go File, Export, Export unmodified Original for 1 Photo..., to a temp folder. It's the same size, with the same EXIF data, but the Photos import from iPhoto has altered the created and modified file dates. But the Photos app, at least "knows" the original date, which I could also check on both files directly, in Preview, through the EXIF data.
LAST THING! Having deleted the exported copy of the original from Photos, I did a Spotlight search for the file name, and it opened in Preview. Then I Cmd-clicked on the file name in the title bar and realised that this is the original file inside the new database!! The different internal organisation of Photos meant that it was in a different folder name inside the new Library database. It reflects the time of import, not the time the photo was taken.
Confidence restored! Deletion time! The only thing people *might* want to do with iPhoto first, is check if they need to check or change anything like tags in Photos to ensure they can find everything that they could in the old application.
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Feb 26, 2016 4:29 AM in response to iangreenby léonie,At least then we can save the space taken up by the iPhoto app itself,
I would not delete the iPhoto application, at least not without keeping a backup. As long as there are older iPhoto Libraries, perhaps on older external drives, that we may need to open to restore photos, I would make dead sure, that I still can launch iPhoto. It may be difficult to get iPhoto back, if we discover that we need to access older libraries. I just had to revert back to a backup copy of an iPhoto library from 2003 to restore a JPEG that had become corrupted a long time ago, and I never noticed it.