Deleting iMovie files

If you are talking about deleting projects from the iMovie Library package contents, no, do not mess with that. To do so could corrupt your library. (The package contents are what you see when you control-Click on the iMovie Library icon in your movies folder, and select Show Package Contents in the drop down menu.)

To delete files in iMovie you delete the project, and then go to All Events in the media side bar and delete the event that bears the project name. Delete the Event itself, not just the contents in the event. Then you can check in the iMovie Library package contents and you will see a Trash folder that contains what you have deleted. The next time you open iMovie the Trash folder and its contents will automatically delete.

-- Rich

Check for yourself, but it looks to me that the All Events folder contains only events from deleted projects. So there naturally would be files in your library folder that aren't in the all events folder. And until the events are deleted from the All Events folder they would remain in the library.

If you see an empty iMovie project in your iMovie Library that means that you didn't properly delete the project. After deleting the project you need to delete the project event itself in the All Events folder, not just the clips in the event. When you delete the project event (Select/File/Delete) the project will disappear from your iMovie Library. I would not delete anything directly from the iMovie Library. I deleted a project from there once and it corrupted my library. Fortunately I had a backup.

-- Rich

No! As Rich has said never delete from the Library contents. The project media event I spoke about will automatically be deleted when you delete the project. I only mentioned it as a contributor to the difference you see in file size between library and all events.

Hi, again,

It is a bit confusing so I can understand your frustration. The procedure that you followed will only delete a clip from a project, but not from the iMovie library. It still remains in the system.

If you want to delete a clip permanently from the system you must delete it from the iMovie library itself, that stores in the finder all imported clips -- in a folder titled Original Media. To access the Original Media folder from within iMovie, select a clip in the library media browser or in a project and do a File/Reveal in Finder. A pop-up folder will appear showing your selected clip highlighted. Delete the clip from there to remove it from the system.

You can also access the Original Media folder for a project by doing a control-click on the iMovie Library folder located in your Movies folder. Then click on Show Package Contents. Your projects will be listed there and when you click on them a subfolder will appear containing the Original Media folder for that project. However, as I mentioned in an earlier post it is best not to mess with anything in the Show Package Contents. Instead, delete it from within iMovie as described in the previous paragraph.

When you delete a clip permanently from the iMovie library it will remove it from all projects that may be using the clip, not just the one you are working with, essentially disabling those projects.

Hope this helps.

-- Rich

After I upgraded to the most recent version of iMovie (10.1.8) from 8.0.6, I now have two "libraries" - Library 1 is 48.57GB, I don't know how big Library 2 is because it does not show up in Finder. This "Library 1" appears to be the storage place for everything I did before this month, when I upgraded. It is in addition to all of my media, my projects and my events, and it's huge. They never took up this much space before. The original media files are 1-2GB each mostly, and there's only a dozen or so of those. My iMovie Events folder is 35.02GB, but somehow altogether my Movies folder takes up a whopping 106.37GB. I use MOVAVI Video Converter to convert the YesVideo files to mp4s, and tried to keep my output under 1GB, but wanted the highest quality, so sometimes the files were more like 10 GB. My brand new 2017 iMac came with 251GB of flash storage, and it keeps filling up. I guess if I am going to continue to make home movies, an external hard drive is necessary - that just seems so inefficient. I wonder if Adobe or Movavi movie software creates such huge libraries, but then they probably couldn't import the projects just as they are.

Just to add to Rich's comment you also have a project media event for each project which contains any files you imported to it and they are in the library but not in the All Events smart folder.