Cleaning out a few pics

Question

Cleaning out a few pics

So, I have a 2011 13" MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM and Mac OS X 10.7.3. I'm still running iPhoto '09 version 8.1.2. I guess I've reached iPhoto's limit with 190,000 pictures. iPhoto has ground to a halt. I've never deleted a picture that I've downloaded from my camera, until now I never thought I would need to. But it's so slow now I can't do my regular routine of editing pictures from an event down to an album that I use iWeb to publish (now) to my own site. I've take a look at the Activity Monitor and iPhoto not overloading the CPU, paging out because it's ran out of RAM nor is it taxing the hard drive. So, I guess I need to edit out some of the older pictures that I've never put into an album.

I already had a smart album callled "Everything Editied" which includes every picture that's ever been added to "any" album. I thought I'd be able to do the opposite and create a smart album with every picture that's NOT in an alubm. I can do that, but I can't delete any pictures out of it. I'd really like to keep all of the pictures I've taken the time to edit for use, I don't want to just delete old events. (I've been taking more and more pictures over time, so even if I delted all the pictures from 2004-2008 It wouldn't clean-out all that many. Also, I've spent a whole lot of time geo-tagging my pictures and removing edited pictures just because they're old will remove them from the map.

Any suggestions for removing un-edtied pictures from older events? I've put captions on most, but not all, of the edited pictures, so deleting generic-named pictures isn't an answer...

-Doug

2.7GHz i7 13" MacBook Pro 8GB RAM-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7), 1TB Time Capsule/64GB iPod touch 4g

Posted on Apr 10, 2012 1:49 PM

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Answer 1

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,402 points

Apr 10, 2012 2:12 PM in response to Douglas McLaughlin

A Smart Album

Photo -> is not -> Edited

will find all the unedited pics. Sort on Date for the older ones.

There's a nominal limit of 250k on an iPhoto library and we’ve seen reports on here of libraries in excess of 300k.

How much free space on the Disk?

You can have multiple libraries of course, if you don't want to delete photos.

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Answer 2

Apr 10, 2012 4:22 PM in response to Yer_Man

Thanks, I was able to make a smart album to find the unused pictures (by "editing" I don't actually alter the pictures, but just put the ones I choose into an album). So "Album 'is not' Any" finds them. But once I've found them I can't do anything with them. Flagging them flags them in the event, where I could delete them, but you can't sort by flagged pictures in an event. I still have almost 200GB of available space on my hard drive out of 750GB.

-Doug

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Answer 3

Apr 10, 2012 4:24 PM in response to Douglas McLaughlin

Select all the photos in the Smart Album and right-click and select Trash.

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Answer 4

Apr 10, 2012 4:37 PM in response to Peter Joshua

Thanks, but "Move to Trash" is greyed-out whether I select one picture or multiple. If I flag some pictures from the smart album, all I can do is unflag them in the automatic "Flagged" list. I can see the flagged pictures in the original event and delete them (by selecting and pressing the "Delete" key or right-clicking and moving them to the Trash). But I wish I could delete them right from the smart album I created.

-Doug

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Answer 5

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,402 points

Apr 10, 2012 11:19 PM in response to Douglas McLaughlin

To delete from a Smart Album:

control-command-delete

Regards

TD

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Answer 6

Apr 11, 2012 3:03 PM in response to Yer_Man

Maybe that works in iPhoto '11? It does nothing in my iPhoto '09 (8.1.2).

-Doug

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Answer 7

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,402 points

Apr 11, 2012 3:09 PM in response to Douglas McLaughlin

Play around. It may be alt-command-delete in 09. You can see the shortcuts under the Help menu.

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Answer 8

Apr 11, 2012 3:13 PM in response to Yer_Man

After a bit of poking around, I made a smart album that only included pictures from one year that were not added to any album (because my original "Album 'is not' Any" had 128,000 pictures in it and couldn't really be scrolled through). This whittled down the 2008 year album to a functional 16,000 pictures. Instead of flagging the pictures I rated them "1" in small bunches.There are some events I'd rather keep all the pictures from, so this allows me to pick and choose. I was then able to go back to the original event and sort by rating. I don't usually use the ratings otherwise. This way I was able to find the unused pictures out of each event and delete them from the event. Whew! It's going to take quite some time to get through all of them. Besides iPhoto getting a bit dragged down, iWeb takes almost 15 minutes to find all the pictures in iPhoto before I can drag them into a new page.

-Doug

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