IPhoto using up my hard drive. Solutions?

Question

Hello!
    I am running iPhoto on my Macbook Air which obviously has a limited amount of storage space.  I've been importing pictures to it in iPhoto and I've ended up filling up my hard drive.  I think one of my primary problems is that I've been taking pictures from my DSLR camera and since the format is RAW, the pictures are huge.  I've changed my camera to use JPEG compression, because I don't think I need raw images.  But now I'm kind of stuck trying to figure out how to compress my photos within iPhoto.
    I've read through the forums and I know that I can export my pictures and compress them to JPEG and resize.  But what I really need to do, in order to save my hard drive as well as my photos, is to compress and possibly resize all the Original Files that iPhoto is indexing.  I've only got about 2GB of wiggle room at this point.  Is there a good way to batch compress and resize these photos within iPhoto?  Or do I need to use something like Image Magick and hope that iPhoto will still be okay with the changes?
    Another idea I had was to maybe use some kind of cloud storage for my iPhoto pictures.  Is this a viable way to deal with my hard drive issues?   I don't mind paying a monthly fee to save my pictures.  I just want to make sure things won't get screwed up with my iPhoto library and that the service won't cache too much on my local hard drive.
    I would appreciate any advice on this problem.  Thanks Apple Community.

Answer 1

There is no way to compress your original files in iPhoto. End of story.
This is a major concern:
I've only got about 2GB of wiggle room at this point.
OS X needs about 10 gigs of hard drive space for normal OS operations - things like virtual memory, temporary files and so on.
Without this space your Mac will slow down as the OS hunts for space on the disk, files will be fragmented, also slowing things down, apps will crash and the risk of data corruption - that is damage to your files, photos, music - increases exponentially.
Your first priority is to make more space on that HD. Nothing else can be done until you do.
Purchase an external HD and move your Photos and Music to it. Both iPhoto and iTunes can run perfectly well with the Library on an external disk.
For instance: to move your iphoto Library:
Make sure the drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
Regards
TD