I have deleted all but one of the events and projects in iMovie; the surviving event contains a single media file of 1.09 GB and the exported movie file is 4.32 GB, but the library is over 30GB - I cannot believe this is right. Is there a way to condense the library file to s reasonable size?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.15
Hi,
Here's a link that explains how to organize projects and events, including how to delete media from the iMovie library.
https://help.apple.com/imovie/mac/10.1/#/mov74d7d370c
iMovie projects contain only small sized thumbnails of the Original Media that is contained in the iMovie library. So deleting a project from within the iMovie app will not delete the media out of the library, unless you delete the entire Event that contains the media. You must delete the entire event rather than the clips within the event. Be aware that deleting media from your iMovie library will delete it from all projects that may be referencing that media, thus effectively disabling the projects.
-- Rich
Hi,
Here's a link that explains how to organize projects and events, including how to delete media from the iMovie library.
https://help.apple.com/imovie/mac/10.1/#/mov74d7d370c
iMovie projects contain only small sized thumbnails of the Original Media that is contained in the iMovie library. So deleting a project from within the iMovie app will not delete the media out of the library, unless you delete the entire Event that contains the media. You must delete the entire event rather than the clips within the event. Be aware that deleting media from your iMovie library will delete it from all projects that may be referencing that media, thus effectively disabling the projects.
-- Rich
Thanks. As mentioned I have already deleted all the projects and all the events from the library except one project that contains just one clip of size 1.09 GB. So I am struggling to understand why the library is still over 30GB - as this leaves very little space on my hard drive and I have done quite a bit of housekeeping, it is a bit of a problem!
Yes, I realize that you said you had deleted all projects and events but one. What I need to know is the steps that you took to delete the projects and events, and to establish that they in fact were correctly deleted.
Go to your Movies folder (Go/Home/Movies) and control click on your library's icon. Then click on Show Package Contents in the drop down menu. A folder will pop up showing all of the projects and events that are in the library. Take a screen shot of the folder and post it along with a description of what you see in there. Don't move or change anything.
If you had correctly deleted from the library all of the projects and events but one then there should be nothing in the Show Package Contents but that one undeleted project and about 4 temp and plist files. If more projects are shown in the Show Package Contents then they were not actually deleted. In that's the case, would you describe the steps that you had taken to delete the projects and events so that we can track down what went wrong.
-- Rich
You are welcome. Hopefully it will cure the issue.
One poster recently reported that the new update caused a large library size. Don't know whether that is a global issue or just related to his setup. Just thought that I would pass it along in case it might apply to your situation.
-- Rich
Thanks, I'll try that.
How do I reduce the file size of the iMovie library?
