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martyroxx

Q: Double library (iPhoto + Photos)

Hi all,

 

I've been struggling with low HDD space for a while now, so a couple of months ago I decided to finally start organising and sorting my photos properly, eliminating doubles, bad pictures etc.

I freed up quite a few GB (7 or 8) yesterday, so I was quite shocked when I got the "you don't have enough space" message this morning. I went to check if the Photo library had lowered in size and I noticed that I have not one, but two libraries: iPhoto Library and Photo Library. The former has not changed in size (still around 100GB), but the latter has (it's now 93BG). I suspect the two libraries are the same, except that I've been modifying the Photo library only since I installed El Capitan in March.

Can I safely delete the iPhoto library or will I lose the "event" folders I used to have there? I can still see them in Photos in a separate folder, so I'm not sure they were transferred in the new library properly..

What do you suggest?

Thanks

MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2013), iOS 10

Posted on Sep 20, 2016 1:12 AM

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Q: Double library (iPhoto + Photos)

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  • by Jesse_K,

    Jesse_K Jesse_K Sep 20, 2016 4:31 PM in response to martyroxx
    Community Specialists
    Sep 20, 2016 4:31 PM in response to martyroxx
    Hey Martyroxx,

    I understand that you are seeing two different libraries and are concerned that this may be taking up more space than needed. I actually ran into something similar when i was trying to clean up my internal drive.

    A great article explaining how the two libraries work is Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries
    It explains how the two libraries will not use up extra space.

    Cheers!
  • by leroydouglas,

    leroydouglas leroydouglas Sep 20, 2016 6:31 PM in response to martyroxx
    Level 7 (23,806 points)
    Notebooks
    Sep 20, 2016 6:31 PM in response to martyroxx

    No you do not want to delete, they are really shared libraries with data links.

     

    You can delete the iphoto app if you don't want it but it is not so many MB in size.

  • by martyroxx,

    martyroxx martyroxx Sep 21, 2016 2:06 AM in response to Jesse_K
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 21, 2016 2:06 AM in response to Jesse_K

    Thank you for your reply Jesse_K.

    These are the file specs for the two libraries. As you can see, they're both around 100GB, which is quite a lot. Also, the iPhoto library was last updated on March 22nd, which is when the new Photo Library was created.

    I'm pretty sure I don't have 200GB of photos (I didn't when I updated my OS, and I didn't take that many from March until now!), so maybe there is something wrong somewhere?

    Schermata 2016-09-21 alle 10.01.37.pngSchermata 2016-09-21 alle 10.01.54.png

  • by martyroxx,

    martyroxx martyroxx Sep 21, 2016 2:09 AM in response to leroydouglas
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 21, 2016 2:09 AM in response to leroydouglas

    Thank you leroydouglas. What puzzles me is that both libraries are around 100GB in size (see pictures I shared below) so they take up almost all of my storage space. When I switched from Lion to Capitan I had around 100GB free space on my Mac, which became 20GB or something when I updated the OS. I blamed the new OS and apps, but now I think it's the two libraries! Could it be that the system somehow forgot to copy just the data links and actually duplicated everything?