is there anyway to get rid of the old iPhoto Library? It defeats the purpose of having a new software if I have to keep the remnants of the older one.

You can delete iPhoto and the old iPhoto Library if you wish, but it might be wise to keep them a while until you are fully comfortable with Photos. Then you can delete them.

You don't have to keep the old iPhoto library and iPhoto application, but I would wait a bit and test. Photos is very different from iPhoto, and you may want to use iPhoto for some tasks, like adding GPS tags to photos or batch changing of titles and captions.

if you decide to delete iPhoto and the library now, be sure to have a working backup. iPhoto is no longer available from the App Store, and if you should want to revert ti iPhoto, you will not be able to install it again otherwise.

I'm with ag993, I'm going to end up deleting my old Aperture and iPhoto libraries and the applications themselves, it's just going to happen at some point, but can someone confirm I won't lose any data in doing so? With no future development on Aperture and iPhoto there's no point in sticking with them even if I can't do something in Photos.

Where are the masters actually stored upon conversion from Aperture to Photos? Photos?

Thanks.

it's just going to happen at some point, but can someone confirm I won't lose any data in doing so?

If the upgrade of your library went well, the original library is redundant. But you have to test it. We are talking about brand-new software, half a day out of Beta testing. I would not dare to say it is safe to delete the original library, until you have thourougly tested it.

Where are the masters actually stored upon conversion from Aperture to Photos? Photos?

In both or neither of them. The migration created hard links to the original image files. A hard link is for all purposes like the original file. You can either delete the Aperture library or the Photos library and your photos will stay. The storage will only be released, if you delete both libraries.

Gotcha, that makes sense.

Thanks.

I guess my one short sentence didn't say this clearly enough. 😁

i would not delete the iPhoto library after reading this article. Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries - Apple Support

Regards, Michael

dubthedankest wrote:

Where are the masters actually stored upon conversion from Aperture to Photos? Photos?

The master files are stored on your drive, but they are not actually stored "in" any folder. Folders are really just special files that store various bits of information about the files associated with that folder, including links to where they actually are stored. That's why you can "move" a file from one folder to another very quickly: all that you really are doing is moving the link & other info from one folder to the other folder, while the file itself stays where it was.

Because of this, it is possible for more than one folder to link to the same file -- in the Finder it looks just like there are two copies of the file, one in each folder, but there really is just the one copy. From the description in the Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries doc, it looks like that's what happens when you import your iPhoto library into Photos -- both the old iPhoto Library "file" (which actually is a set of folders & subfolders of files) & the Photos Library (also consisting of folders & files) contain links to the master files, but like the Apple doc says, there really is just one set of master files being stored.

This is very similar to the way Time Machine backups look like they have multiple copies of the same unique file, one in each time-stamped backup folder, but there really is only one copy on the Time Machine drive. My guess is Apple is using hard links for this, which means the actual master files will not be deleted from the file system as long as at least one link remains to each of them.

So you should be safe in deleting the old iPhotos Library once you are absolutely sure you don't need it, but to be sure, if it was me I would make a backup just in case, or better yet just leave it alone.

What I don't understand is when I delete a photo from Photos, it still remains in iPhoto. So I need to go delete it from iPhoto, too, to actually save the space and remove the photo? Is this right?

My guess is Apple is using hard links for this, which means the actual master files will not be deleted from the file system as long as at least one link remains to each of them.

Yes, they are hard links. When I checked the originals in the Terminal, the original image files in the Masters folders in the iPhoto Library and the Photos library had the same inode numbers. So they are identical files.

I found the first reference to hard links in this article: Six Colors: The (hard) link between Photos and iPhoto

What I don't understand is when I delete a photo from Photos, it still remains in iPhoto. So I need to go delete it from iPhoto, too, to actually save the space and remove the photo? Is this right?

The iphoto Library and the Photos Library are separate libraries. Any edits you do with Photos in the Photo Library will leave the iPhoto Library unchanged and vice versa.

An as for the linked original image files - when you delete a photo in Photos, the hard link to the file will be deleted. That will result in a decrease in the reference count for the file. if still another library is linked to the file, the file will not be removed from the disk, only when the last link is gone.

Thanks for the info & link to that article. It is very informative!

What if I then move the new Photos library to a new drive? Will it copy the masters over, or will the hard links be across to the old drive? That would be a problem since I could unmount the old drive.

Joshua Wein wrote:

What if I then move the new Photos library to a new drive? Will it copy the masters over, or will the hard links be across to the old drive? That would be a problem since I could unmount the old drive.

As I understand it, hard links are not preserved if you move the library to a different drive. The masters, previews, thumbnails, databases, etc. in the original library will be copied to the new drive & fully functional, but nothing will hard link back to the original.