Can I delete iLife? Unsure if I need it.

Question

Can I delete iLife? Unsure if I need it.

An alert to update iLife Support 9.0.4 will not take me to installing this update. I no longer use iPhotos and all my photos/videos have transferred to Photos. I never made a movie although I see that iMovie is still in use as is Garage Band but I use neither. If I delete all iLife stuff Apple Support tell me the alert will disappear, but they won't tell me to delete all iLife stuff. They are just scared of 'what if' occurs. To my knowledge I have never used iLife other than iPhotos as described. I suppose I am scared that deleting it will affect my photos/videos in anyway. Does anybody know? I have ticked iPhoto for Mac as the topic but this doesn't really cover it.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 4, 2020 6:41 AM

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Answer 1

léonie

Level 10

195,285 points

Jul 5, 2020 11:00 AM in response to barneyhairball

Are you seeing all videos and photos on your iCloud web page? If you open www.icloud.com in a web browser and open the Photos.app there? Just to be sure, that all your photos and videos are now in iCloud.

There are a few possible reasons for the slow download from iCloud, when you try to view videos.

iCloud is not working well, if your iCloud storage is full. Then you will get random results, until you solve the problem with the lack of iCloud storage.
The download from iCloud may be very slow, if you do not have enough free storage on your Mac. Even with plenty of free iCloud storage you must not upload more items to iCloud than will easily fit optimised onto your Mac.
The iCloud from iCloud may be slow, if you are having network problems. Use a fast Wi-Fi connection and make sure, that no anti virus filter or third-party firewall is blocking the connection to Apple's could servers.
Photos can be horribly slow, if the Photos Library is on an external volume that is not compatible with photos. The volume should have the file system format MacOS extended (Journaled) or APFS, not case sensitive, and locally mounted, not accessed over the network.
You will have problems with videos and photos, that you imitated to iPhoto and migrated to Photos, if the format of these media files is no longer supported by Catalina. I had to convert most of the videos that have taken many years ago to a different format, before I upgraded to Catalina. Unsupported media format can cause the background processes in Photos to hang, see: How to Weed out Legacy Media in Photos for Mac - Apple Community

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

195,285 points

Jul 4, 2020 9:40 AM in response to barneyhairball

iPhoto will no longer run on a Mac with macOS 10.15 Catalina. So you can safely delete the iPhoto.app.

If you still have the iPhoto Library you may want to move it to a backup volume, just in case you need to recover photos and videos from it, if you should discover later, that some items are missing in your new Photos Library.

If you do not use iMovie, you can delete it as well. You can reinstall from the AppStore should you want it later. You can also delete GarageBand, if you never used it.

I am using GarageBand and iMovie a lot to create sound tracks for slideshows or stabilise video clips, but you do not need these AppStore run Photos for Mac.

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Answer 3

Jul 5, 2020 10:40 AM in response to léonie

Thank you. I have posted a few questions after finding my videos buffering for ages after syncing all my devices to the cloud. I say this because I had previously deleted all iLife folders and thought that deleting them had caused the buffering. But now believe it is because the cloud is taking forever to download the videos when I viewed them on my iPhone and iPad; and therefore not due iLife. Please advise if you know different.

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Answer 4

Jul 6, 2020 12:50 PM in response to léonie

Yes, I can see all my photos and vids on iCloud.com. I have enough storage on iCloud and all my devices. I don't know what an anti-virus filter is - Norton etc? The only protection I have is Apple Firewall. I only view photos/vids on my devices. My BB is not very good but I didn't have any issue with buffering in the past. I have lots of vids post-iPhoto and they buffer also. I read How to Weed ... and hopefully I will understand it. We now have full fibre in the uk, ie, fibre from the exchange to the modem/router, but the price is prohibitive for me. One day maybe when it is available from lots of providers but at present I believe it is only BT in my area. Thank you again.

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Can I delete iLife? Unsure if I need it.

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