Hello.
Is it safe to delete the old 1.7 GB iPhotos app since Photos app took
over in mac OS Sierra v10.12.6? Where is iPhotos app getting the old
photos (newest was from early 2017!) from since it probably takes GB of
disk space? Can I delete its old photos too without harming Photos
app's?
Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)
MacBook Pro
If you have migrated all your iPhoto Libraries to Photos and Photos can read them, no photos missing, you can delete the iPhoto.app to save storage. But I would keep a copy on an external drive, just in case you may need to open an old iPhoto Library later to recover photos that have not been migrated complete. If there are old iPhoto Libraries in your Pictures folder, that have been converted to Photos libraries, you can also remove the iPhoto Libraries. You do not need both the old iPhoto Library and the new Photos Library. But I recommend to keep a copy of the old libraries, just in case. I needed the old libraries occasionally to recover photos that had been corrupted.
If you have migrated all your iPhoto Libraries to Photos and Photos can read them, no photos missing, you can delete the iPhoto.app to save storage. But I would keep a copy on an external drive, just in case you may need to open an old iPhoto Library later to recover photos that have not been migrated complete. If there are old iPhoto Libraries in your Pictures folder, that have been converted to Photos libraries, you can also remove the iPhoto Libraries. You do not need both the old iPhoto Library and the new Photos Library. But I recommend to keep a copy of the old libraries, just in case. I needed the old libraries occasionally to recover photos that had been corrupted.
Photos does not need the iPhoto.app and the old iPhoto Library, once you migrated to photos to Photos.
If you have done the migration, you do not need iPhoto to use the Photos library. But you will not free much storage by deleting the old iPhoto Libraries, because the photos have been copied as hard links to save storage.
This is explained here: Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries - Apple Support
You may want to finish all migrating before you upgrade to Catalina, because iPhoto will no longer run on Catalina, not even the iPhoto Library upgrader tool. Without the upgrader tool it will not be possible to migrate very old iPhoto Libraries (iPhoto 7.1.2 or older) at all.
If you are sure, go ahead and delete the iPhoto Libraries with the filename extension ".migratedphotlibrary". These habe been opened by and migrated by Photos.
Photos app seems to show all the old iPhoto's photos since 15" 2008 MacBook Pro's Mac OS X v10.5.x and iPhone 4S days. And then, migrated to a 2012 13.3" MacBook Pro that came with Mac OS X v10.8.x (Mountain Lion). And then, I upgraded its Mac OS to mac OS Sierra v10.12. There are like thousands of images and hundred of video recordings from iPhones (4S and 6+) and imports from other sources. :O
Is it safe to delete the old 1.7 GB iPhotos app since Photos app took over in mac OS Sierra v10.12.6?
