Andrew Pollock2
Level 1 (24 points)
Mac OS X

Q: There are two photo library in my Picture folder. Can I delete one?

There exists a Photos Library of 544.4 GB and an iPhoto Library of 502.04 GB in my picture folder. My machine has a 1TB drive. What gives? Can I delete one? I had carefully organized events over a long period of time in iPhoto's, Idon't want to lose that information.

iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Posted on Jul 17, 2015 8:55 AM

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Andrew Pollock2

Q: There are two photo library in my Picture folder. Can I delete one?

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  • by léonie,Helpful

    léonie léonie Jul 17, 2015 9:03 AM in response to Andrew Pollock2
    Level 10 (108,906 points)
    iCloud
    Jul 17, 2015 9:03 AM in response to Andrew Pollock2

    There exists a Photos Library of 544.4 GB and an iPhoto Library of 502.04 GB in my picture folder.

    Both libraries are sharing the photos by hard links. The photos inside the two libraries only use the storage once, see these documents:

     

    You can delete the iPhoto Library, after making a backup copy, but it will not free much storage, since the image files are also used by photos and only removed from the disk, if you delete them in Photos as well.

     

    But wait with the deletion of the iPhoto library until you are very sure that all your photos and the metadata and albums migrated well.

    You may need the original library if you later discover a problem that can only be fixed by migrating the library again.

     

    I had carefully organized events over a long period of time in iPhoto's, Idon't want to lose that information.

    Photos created a set of albums in a folder "iPhoto events".  Look on the Albums page for this folder. You will find one album for each of your iPhoto events with the same name as the event.