I use iPhoto to store my photos, even though I do my editing in Photoshop from the RAW files. Using iPhoto to begin with is probably my mistake, but today I figured out a couple things that will save me some disk space.

If you use the edit function in iPhoto to zoom in on and compare images, then iPhoto will save “modified” copies in the iPhoto library, even if you didn’t actually make any changes. I figured this out because I never modify photos in iPhoto, but had 15GB of modified images from the past 3 months. You can avoid this by using the full-screen mode to zoom in on images and compare.

If you have loads of these images, you can select all the events in your library and then choose Photos>Revert to Original and all these extra copies will be deleted. (The exception is if you have some movie files, it will keep the JPEGs it made as thumbnails for those.) Unfortunately, if you have RAW photos in your iPhoto library that are mixed in with your JPEGs you won’t get the Revert to Original menu option, you’ll get Reprocess RAW instead. In that case, you’re out of luck unless you remove all the RAW photos from the library.

I actually do move my RAW files every few months when I build a new iPhoto library, so from now on, after I pull those out of my library, I’ll revert to original on my old library to make it a smaller archive.

I guess it might be easier to switch to a more pro-style application for workflow management.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 2nd, 2010 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Fruits News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.