Multiple files and locations for the same photos

Question

Hi all~
Hoping someone can help me find a simple solution to my problem. I've been trying to organize my photos on my mac, and I've been taking a lot of time to create albums in iphoto and rearranging all of my files. I got a message this morning that I have little space left on my startup disk, and that I need to delete some files. I suspected immediately that it had something to do with the pictures, so as a test, I searched in Finder for a few of the photo file names, to see how many copies there were. Not surprisingly, there were MULTIPLE copies of the photos, one in my iphotos folder, another in my regular photos folder, and sometimes two in the regular folder. I also had alias files listed in my iphoto albums, but considering the size of those, they are just a link to the real photo file. Is there an easy way to get rid of the dupes, or do I just have to sit and take the time to go through them by hand? Also, is there a better way to upload photos and manage the files, so that I don't have this problem again? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Noreen

Answer 1

Hi, Noreen. Whenever you import photos into iPhoto's library, they are copied (not moved) from their original locations to locations controlled and managed by iPhoto, in the iPhoto Library folder inside your account's Pictures folder. If the original picture files you imported were located on your hard drive instead of on a camera memory card, CD, or other storage media, then after the import you are storing each image twice on your hard drive: once inside and once outside your iPhoto Library. While there may be some comfort in having two copies of your photos stored that way, it's not a useful backup strategy: if your hard drive fails, both copies are apt to be lost.
Here is a backup strategy that will enable you to recover all your pictures and albums in the event of a primary hard drive failure, and will eliminate the duplication of image files on your primary hard drive. It assumes that you want to use iPhoto to manage and organize all your pictures — an assumption that isn't valid for every user, but works for many.
1) Identify all the images on your hard drive that you haven't yet imported into iPhoto, but that you want to save. You will have to do this manually. Make a list of all their locations as you identify them, so you'll be able to find them again quickly during step 2.
2) Import all those images into iPhoto, and arrange them in albums to suit yourself.
3) Copy your iPhoto Library folder to another storage medium that is large enough to hold the entire folder. Typically, this will need to be another hard drive: internal if your Mac provides space for one; external if it doesn't, or if you don't want to open up the Mac and install another internal drive. Most users' iPhoto Library folders are (or will soon become) too large to fit on a CD; many are too large to fit on a DVD. The absolutely essential point to remember is that to preserve its identity as a functional iPhoto Library, the library folder must be copied to the backup storage medium *as a single, intact unit* — copying it piecemeal or spreading it over several CDs is a path to certain disaster. The contents of that folder are interrelated in ways that only iPhoto understands. Disrupting those relationships by dividing the library into segments destroys all the work you've done to organize your pictures within iPhoto. All that work will have to be laboriously repeated if you alter or break up the structure of the backup library, and then lose your primary library to a hard drive failure or computer theft.
4) Delete all photos from your primary hard drive that are not stored inside the iPhoto Library folder. This eliminates the storage of duplicate copies on that drive and frees up space.
You are now committed to using iPhoto, rather than the Finder's hierarchical folder structures, for the organization and management of all your digital photos. You have no photos that are stored outside the iPhoto Library folder, and for the reasons I described at length under #3 above, you shouldn't use the Finder to meddle in any way with the contents of that folder. Everything you want to do with your pictures from now on can and should be done using the commands and preferences within iPhoto, not manually in the Finder.
Note that the procedure outlined above will, at first, consume more disk space rather than less, as the import process makes new copies inside your iPhoto Library of photos that were formerly stored only outside it. You will later regain duplicated-storage space by deleting all externally-stored images, and if you already had a lot of duplicates before starting this process, you'll probably end up with more available disk space at the end than you have now. But if your available disk space is already minimal now, you may have to take steps to increase it before starting on the process I've outlined. This article may help you do that.
Good luck!