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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

My iPhoto Library grew rapidly over the years. As in: it doubled its size, even though I did not add many photos. Thus, after a few years, I ended up with an iPhoto Library of 60 gigs that contained 30 gigs worth of photos.

And apparently, I am not the only one with this problem. And there seems to be no way to fix this. At all.

Luckily, at some point I found some 3rd party software that can rebuild an iPhoto library by basically simulating the user dragging all his images there manually and re-applying all the tags and stuff by hand. Honestly, what they are doing is quite an achievement in the face of an utterly defective piece of software.

Edit:

For the record, I used this tool to salvage my library: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/

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When you double-click a photo in iPhoto to look at it full screen, it makes a copy of it on the chance that you intend to edit it. It stores that in a shadow directory called "Modified". Even if you don't edit it, the copy is retained.

Right click on iPhoto Library, Show Package Contents, look at size of Modified vs Originals folders to see if this is the cause behind your library doubling. If it is the case, please report back, I'd like to know as I also do not care for the implementation of this functionality.

If you crop and such your photos then you can't just delete the Modified ones without trouble.

Are you serious? I double click pretty much every photo I find interesting in my collection. Is that not the natural way to view a photo full-size? Editing requires you to click "edit". Why would they needlessly allow this to bloat if no edits are made?

I currently have:

    1.2G Previews
    7.8G Masters

(BTW in my version at least, Modified/Originals are symlinks to Previews/Masters.)

Same here, as far as I understand it, when you rotate a pic, or make some other changes, it creates a new version.

At the time, I did look into that stuff, but the Modified folders were not the problem. There was something else going on.

If you're feeling up for a safari (har), go to your iPhoto Library, right-click -> Show Package Contents, and check out the sizes of each folder inside of here.

(the terminal command 'du' or the freeware GrandPerspective.app works well)

Pay close attention to the "iPod Photo Cache". Any sync to an iOS device that requires a down-res means a huge volume of quasi-thumbnails get stuffed here, one set for each target resolution.

If you run into something like that, look inside the bundle with OmniDiskSweeper and see what's using up space.

(For instance you might have switched your camera to RAW unintentionally, or told iPhoto to save pictures as 16-bit raw TIFF)

I think the reason why your photos are doubling is because I believe you are importing them into iPhoto and then back into the iPhone. You will get two copies of all your photos on your iPhone because they get imported into iPhoto and then back out. It's super annoying, so I shut iPhoto completely off.

I don't ever put photos on my iPhone and I didn't sync my iPhone in the last year or so. Besides, I don't take all that many pictures with the iPhone.

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