Clean Up Mac Photos Library
When photography was print, it was an expensive hobby or career. A rare few made that leap from taking pictures for fun to making a living from it, which often required talent, a little money, or a lucky first client or two.
Jun 07, 2015 Mastering Photos for OS X Want to delete your old library after migrating to Photos for OS X? Worried Photos, iPhoto and Aperture for OS X are gobbling up. Oct 07, 2019 Manage storage on your Mac. Store in iCloud. Click the Store in iCloud button, then choose from these options: Optimize Storage. Empty Trash Automatically. Reduce Clutter. Where to find the settings for each feature. May 07, 2015 How-To: Safely shrink your Mac’s giant photo library, deleting duplicate images to save space Gauging The Size Of Your Mac’s Problem. If you’re not sure just how much space your photo collection. Exercise Extreme Caution. Be very careful (yes.
Back up the library in Photos on Mac. Even if you use iCloud Photos, it’s important that you always back up your library locally using one of the following methods. Use Time Machine: After you set up Time Machine, it automatically backs up the files on your Mac. If you ever lose the files in your Photos library, you can restore them from the Time Machine backup. To delete Photos library on Mac: Step 1 Go to Finder. Step 2 Open your system disk Users Pictures. Step 3 Drag the Photos Library you want to delete to the Trash. Step 4 Empty the Trash.
It is a lot easier to get into photography these days. Digital tools mean we all have something on us that could take an award-winning photograph, even if you don’t invest in the latest 40 megapixel SLR.
But for those of us who are snapping away on a regular basis, either professionally or for fun and work - such as bloggers, vloggers and even writers — aren't we all content creators in some way?! — we end up with a lot of pictures on our Macs. Whatever Mac you have, they are perfect machines for storing, editing and publishing, which is great, except for the fact they can soon get full to bursting with images.
Best ways to find duplicate and similar photos
Let’s face it — sometimes it takes dozens of pictures just to get the perfect one, which is easy and free when using a digital camera. Compared to film, when you had to think about every picture, since every single one cost money. Now you can snap away with abandon, and even if none of them are exactly perfect — not a problem, when you've got Photoshop and other handy tools. Almost anything can be removed, added or tweaked with a few clicks.
Duplicate Image Finder
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We can end up with dozens of duplicates, especially when shooting in raw, and then once you start editing, dozens more could be generated. All of this takes up space, and it can take a lot of time to sort and delete manually, or you can try a few of these shortcuts.
Find and remove duplicate photos manually
Every photo is special. Okay, maybe not every single photo — but the ones you want to keep are, whereas the duplicates are just taking up space.
Manual detection and deletion is one approach.
The faster way: use a smart duplicate photo finder
Or you can get Gemini app - it's a smart duplicate finder and cleaner for macOS. Just let it search, select and then, with your permission, zap the duplicates to free up loads of space on your Mac. Here's how to get rid of extra files (both duplicate and similar-looking photos):
- Open duplicate finder.
- Choose where to scan. This can be a folder or your whole Mac.
- Hit Scan.
- View the results and choose which duplicates and similars to remove.
When scanning for photos, make sure to scan in the photos library folder, or your documents folder and any attached external hard drives for images, instead of the Photos app. The icons look similar, but you’ll find what you need in those folders since that will also remove any duplicates lingering within the app automatically.
Once that is done, click on Select Duplicates, and Gemini moves them all to the Trash. So don't worry if you’ve accidentally deleted a finished edit instead of another duplicate - you can easily get them back. And then, once you are sure everything in the trash is junk, use CleanMyMac to shred the trash, which is a great way to really save some space.
Now, a little about the similar files and what they are. Similars are files that have strong resemblance but are a little different: images taken from one angle, dozens of identical selfies, music files with different bitrate etc. This duplicate cleaner has a smart algorithm that can identify and group them, so you'll only have to click on the ones you'd like to keep.
Duplicate photo remover by folders
Another way to get rid of duplicates is using a duplicate remover in Disk Drill, Mac users favorite, because it's an app primarily designed to recover lost data. However, it has multiple great features apart from its main benefit and one of those is removing duplicates.
How To Clean Up A Mac
The process is near identical: install and launch Disk Drill, choose directory for scanning, review results and remove duplicated files that were found on your Mac.
Now that your pictures are organized, you probably want to keep the ones you’ve got tidy and in order. Inboard, also available from Setapp — along with Gemini — is a handy way to manage your entire picture gallery and images workflow, which should save you hours of time in the future.
Here's how to clean up your photo library when the duplicates are gone:
- Open Inboard app.
- Drag a photo into the Inboard window, and the app will save the image in your library.
From then on you can tag photos so that it will be easier to search in the future, make folders in the Inboard app and place images of a category in the folder, sort by date and title, and lots of other things.
That's about it concerning image organization. Photo duplicate removal is an extremely efficient technique for freeing up some room on your Mac's hard drive. Plus, it gets a ton easier to work with all your photo library when you only keep the good stuff. All the apps in this article are on Setapp subscription, in a single suite. So go ahead and explore them! Cheers.
If you’re using the new Photos app on your Mac instead of the older iPhoto app, you most likely have a duplicate photo library floating around on your hard drive. For a lot of people, that could mean gigs and gigs of wasted storage space, especially on shared Macs with multiple migrated libraries. How to delete books from library on mac.
Here’s how to check for multiple libraries and how to delete them…
Before deleting your old library: Make a backup
Clean Up Macbook Pro
While the Photos app should have imported all your photos and videos just fine, I always recommend having backups handy. Perhaps you’ll delete an old photo by accident at some point and want it back later. If you have a copy of your old iPhoto library still handy, you can pull it form there as a last resort.
I saved my old iPhoto library to my Dropbox account. You can of course use any service of your choice, or just drop it onto an external hard disk you have laying around. Regardless of how you do it, I’d highly recommend saving a copy before deleting it.
Once you’ve backed up your old iPhoto library (if you chose to do so), you can proceed with deleting it:
- Open a new Finder window on your Mac.
- Click on Pictures in the left hand navigation. If it isn’t there, just search for your pictures folder using Spotlight.
- You should see two libraries, one is your old iPhoto Library and one is your new Photos library.
- Move your iPhoto Library to your trash can and empty it.
Check the storage space on your Mac, you should notice that you have more storage space available. If you are on a shared Mac and have multiple user logins, everyone using the new version of Photos on that Mac should make sure they don’t also have duplicate libraries.
I’m not sure why Apple doesn’t create a process to delete old versions of libraries after migrating to Photos, but they should. Until that happens, you’ll have to delete your old library manually.
Give this tip a try and see how much storage space you were able to clear up. As you can see in the screens above, my old iPhoto library was over 30GB, which was definitely a healthy chunk of hard drive space that I now have back.
Your Mac storage tips?
This is one of many ways to regain storage space on your Mac without having to sacrifice losing data. But we know there are lots of others. What are some of your favorite Mac storage tips for recapturing space? We’ve love to hear them in the comments!
Clean Up Mac Photos Library Not Updating On Mac
Update
A follower on Twitter referenced to me an article written on Six Colors pointing out that the library is actually hard-linked between versions. While this may be true when you first migrate, it seems that if you make any changes to any files and the libraries become different, splicing can and will occur.
To test this theory, I deleted my iPhoto library on my other Mac to see how much storage was freed up. For those wondering, my iPhoto library was 35.99 GB and my Photos library was 41.16 GB. You can see the before and after results on my hard disk space below. I was able to free up over 20 GB of space. So I’m not sure what I think about hard linking or how well it’s actually working between Photos and iPhoto.
Bottom line, if you’re short on storage space and you want to free some up, there’s really not much point in having two photo libraries floating around on your Mac. Hard linking or not, deleting the old library will free up space in almost every case.