I recently updated to Yosemite from Mavericks on my late 2009 27inch iMac.
Previously, I had 2 iPhoto libraries. Now I have 4.
A.photolibrary 192 GB
A.migratedphotolibrary 210 GB
B.photoslibrary 70 GB
B. migratedphotolibrary 62 GB
I presume they are redundant and I would like to delete to free up space.
1. Can I delete one?
2. Which one?
Thanks.
iMac (27-inch Late 2009), OS X Mavericks (10.9)
No you now have 2 x iPhoto Libraries and 2 x Photos library - Photos being the new app that came with Yosemite.
While they appear to duplicate large amounts of disk space, they don't. The Photos and the iPhoto Libraries are managing the same files, so removing, say, A.migratedphotolibrary will not get back 210Gb but only 18gb (210-192)
As to which to trash... depends on whether you plan using iPhoto or Photos going forward
Thanks. I'm sure you saved me a lot of grief.
Questions.
1. I teach and take a lot of videos of my classes. I used to save the videos both on the desktop and in iPhotos. I rather guess that is redundant.
Are videos in iPhoto automatically saved on the computer also, where they are accessible without opening iPhoto?
In other words, by saving them in both places, and I doubling the GB used?
2. My iPhoto thing with 210 GB. That seems WAY big to me. I deleted a whole lot of videos, and emptied the delete or trash box, and I think iPhoto should only be taking up about 30 - 40 GB. By my rough calculations, if the Mac really did delete what I told it to, about 100 GB should have been freed up.
Thanks.
When you migrate an iPhoto Library to Photos,the original image files and the previews will be shared by hard links.
Hard links are different from aliases. When a hard link to a file is created, it looks like identical, duplicate filse of the same size, but they are sharing the same entry in the file table and are sharing the same blocks on the disk. The Finder will report twice the storage used, because it is seeing two files. If you delete one file of this pair, the disk space will not be released, because the second file is still using the data. Only when both files have been deleted, will you gain the shared storage back. So, if you delete hard linked items in the original iPhoto library, you will gain no storage back, unless you also delete the corresponding file from the migrated Photos library.
See this document: Six Colors: The (hard) link between Photos and iPhoto
and this support document by Apple (if it is currently readable - there seems to be a problem with Apple's knowledge base articles): Photos saves disk space by sharing images with your iPhoto or Aperture libraries - Apple Support
1. I teach and take a lot of videos of my classes. I used to save the videos both on the desktop and in iPhotos. I rather guess that is redundant.
Are videos in iPhoto automatically saved on the computer also, where they are accessible without opening iPhoto?
Yes it is redundant as - by default, unless you changed a setting - the item is also copied to the Library database.
They are not accessible without opening iPhoto. The whole point of apps like iPhoto is that they replace the file manager for this kind of data. If you don't want that don't use iPhoto - or indeed, Photos the new app.
migrated photo library
