QwertyMan11
Level 1
(24 points)
Q: Can I now delete my iPhoto library?
Now I've upgraded to Photos and my iPhoto library has "converted" across to Photos can I now delete the iPhoto library? its been renamed (by Photos I presume), to iPhoto Library.migratedphotolibrary, and is 15Gb. see my screenshot
thanks
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10)
léonie
Level 10
(108,894 points)
The size of your iPhoto Library shown in the screenshot is misleading. When your iPhoto Library is migrated by Photos, Photos is creating hard links to the image files in your iPhoto Library. This way the storage used is counted twice, but actually the blocks on the disk are shared by the Photos Library and your migrated iPhoto Library.
See these documents:
- Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries - Apple Support
- Six Colors: The (hard) link between Photos and iPhoto
You can delete the iPhoto library, but this will not free much storage. Only when you delete photos both in the iPhoto Library and the Photos Library will the storage be released.
You may need to revert to iPhoto if you discover problems in your Photos Library that can only be fixed by repairing the problem in iPhoto and repeating the migration. So I would wait a bit before burning all bridges, or at least keep a backup copy of the iPhoto Library on an external drive.
