Why has my iPhoto Library become huge ?

Since I upgraded to iPhoto 11 the size of my library has tripled.
I have about 19,000 pics. Most are about a MB in size.
How could my library be 72 GB?
If I recall correctly it was about 20 GB before the upgrade.
Thanks, Eli

I did a standard upgrade from the previous version of iPhoto.
I ran a scan with Grand Perspective to get a better idea of the package contents of the iphoto library.
One of the things that stuck out was the iPod photo cache which is 16GB.
(We sync two iPhones with this iMac)

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Why is the iPhoto Library file so big?

Why is the iPhoto Library File so big?
I cancelled the option in settings that it copies the files to the Library but the LIbrary file grows and grows when I import new photos?
Can someone help me?

You have disabled "Copy items to the iPhoto Library"?
Then the original image files should not be imported; you can check this by selecting one of the recently imported photos and using the command "File > Reveal in Finder > Original File". Does it show you a file outside the library?
Your library will grow in size, when you import and edit photos, even if the originals are not included. iPhoto will store thumbnails of your photos, previews of the edited versions, of the faces, and if you sync your library with iTunes, there will also be an iPod Photo cache, that can be quite large:
iTunes: Understanding the iPod Photo Cache folder
You know, that disabling "Copy items to the iPhoto Library" is quite risky, don't you? Just in case you are not aware of the risks - iPhoto does provide no tools at all, if the connection between your referenced original files and your thumbnails in iPhoto gets broken. Or if you need to move your photos to a different drive, when the drive fails, as will happen one day. You will not be able to migrate the library to a new computer or restoring from your backup will be difficult. You will need third party apps like iPhoto Library Manager to recover from such a situation.
If you need to free space on your mac it is much safer to move the whole library to an external drive, or to split it and relocate the partial library with the older photos to an external drive.
-- Léonie

Why does my iPhoto Library.photolibrary in my MacAir running OS X Yosemite keep expanding?

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Import photo's from camera has destroyed iPhoto library

I upgraded to iPhoto '08 a couple of days ago, and everything worked fine. But, after importing a few photo's from a Nikon point and shoot just now, it appears that I've lost all the other photo's in the library. The photo's that I just imported are now the only ones in the library. Thousands of images have just vanished.
I've checked in the iPhoto Library package and it looks ilke the files are still on disk. I've also tried rebuilding the library and fixing permissions. No luck.
I don't have a recent backup of the iPhoto Library, and I'm not willing to lose several months worth of photo's to go back to an old backup. So what are my options?
I've copied the iPhoto Library to another location and I can create a new library and import everything from the old Originals folder, but what happens to all of the edits I made to these photo's. As far as I can tell they're stored in the Modified folder. Does this mean that I either have to import Orignials and lose the edits, or import the Modified folder and lose the ability to go back to the originals?
This really *****. You would think something as simple as this would have been caught in QA. How did this software ever get to market with a bug like this in it? I'll be able to get my photo's back, although not without a considerable amount of hassle, but what about the thousands of folks out there with their family albums in iPhoto who are about to lose everything as soon as they connect a camera to their Mac. I doubt they'll be thinkging very highly of Apple, that's for sure.

I just did a bit of investigating and things are getting very weird.
iPhoto '08 didn't crash when I did the import, howere I did notice something odd. I store my photographs on an external hard drive and alias to the iPhoto Library from the Pictures folder. After I imported the recent photo's I noticed that my external hard drive was mounted twice in the finder. I unmounted it thinking that it was just an anomoly.
The external drive is called Galaxy1TB. To check to see whether there were multiple libraries on my Mac I did a search in Spotlight for "iPhoto Library." Two showed up, the backup I just made and one located in /Volumes/Galaxy1TB 1/Pictures. Note the fact that it's called "Galaxy1TB 1" and not "Galaxy1TB" even though it shows up in Finder as Galaxy1TB.
Using Terminal I did a cd of /Volumes and it contains Galaxy1TB and Galaxy1TB 1. Galaxy1TB 1 is the volume that is visible through Finder, and it has the iPhoto Library containing all of my old photo's. But, I checked this library, by looking through the package in Finder, and it does not contain the most recent photo import I did from the Nikon point and shoot camera. When I cd into /Volumes/Galaxy1TB there is a single directory called Pictures and it contains another directory called iPhoto Library. Navigating through the various directories in this version of the iPhoto Library I came across the recent Nikon imports.
It seems to me that, when I did the import from the Nikon, iPhoto, which was not started at the time, mounted a new Volume called Galaxy1TB (somehow the existing Volume was renamed Galaxy1TB 1) and it created a new iPhoto Library on the volume and imported the images into it. Now, when I start iPhoto, it is using this doppelganger iPhoto Library rather than the original one.
I suspect that if I restart the Mac, Galaxy1TB will revert to its original state and iPhoto will pick up the correct library. But I don't know what will happen to the library on the currently mounted Galaxy1TB. If it vanishes I will lose the photo's I just imported. I guess there is a possibility that the doppelganger Galaxy1TB will be mounted and I'll lose everything on my external hard drive! I wonder whether it's safe to rm /Volumes/Galaxy11TB through Terminal before restarting the Mac?
Anyway, any thoughts would be appreciated. This thing has got me very confused. I'm going to export the photo's I recently imported, so that I'll have copies when (if?) the library goes away after a restart. But if anyone can give me some assurance that I'm not going to lose the contents of my external drive after I restart, I'd appreciate it.

Why is my iPhoto Library duplicating photos

why is my iPhoto library duplicating photo's, sometimes 3 times ?

Your iPhoto library is not duplicating anything. Give virtually no information the only guess is that you imported an old iPhoto library into a new one. NEVER import one photo library into another one. If you did and still have the old library you can easily recover. Drag the library you messed up to the desktop and drag the old library to the pictures folder and launch iPhoto
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Why does the iPhoto library file copy so slowly?

Every few months I back up all the important stuff on my MacBook Pro (Mid 2012, 13", 750GB) to my 3TB external hard drive.
This has worked well for as long as I can remember. I used to have a proper backup program but due to the nature of my work and files, recently I prefer to just manually copy over each individual folder in my parent home folder, so I can have control of what is replaced and what is merged, etc.
However this time backing up, I had to copy every folder and file in 'Pictures' separately. This is because after trying to copy the parent folder in one transfer it didn't seem to be working well. I noticed that around the 11.22GB mark, the transfer would always slow right down from ~35MB/s to ~0.5MB/s. As you can imagine, with a Pictures folder totalling almost 300GB, this isn't something I wanted to put up with.
In the end, I figured out what was causing the issue. I tried copying just the iPhoto library file and discovered the problem occurred again.
Why? Is this a Yosemite bug or is it to do with the way that the file is structured?
It works fine otherwise and does not seem damaged.

no idea
maybe if you provided some information someone could help
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Slow performance in iPhoto - library is huge

Hello,
I have a huge number of pix in iPhoto (approx 11k) that I have accumulated of my kids over the last three years. The library is about 9.4 GB.
When I open iPhoto, it imports all the pictures every time. I really cannot have any other application open or everything crawls. Even if I just have iPhoto open, the performance is extraordinarily slow. I have about 12 GB of open memory on my hard drive. I moved the iPhoto library to an external drive, but that didnt seem to help the performance issue.
My questions are these:
1) Can I change a setting to have iPhoto only display / bring into memory the last 100 (or 1000) pictures instead of loading all pix every time?
2) Are there any other settings that would reduce the amount of memory it is using to load the pictures every time?
3) Is there something else that I can do to improve speed or performance?
I do run maintenance applications like Onyx occasionally, but it doesnt seem to have much of an impact on iPhoto performance.
Thanks for any help.
- Bob Mallon

We'll probably have other suggestions after you've answered Terence's questions, but for the moment:
1) No, not in iPhoto 4.x or earlier.
2) No. But you can make it operate faster by reducing the size of your thumbnails in Organize view, if they are now large or largish. At a certain size, which depends on your monitor resolution as well as on how you've set iPhoto's zoom slider, iPhoto switches from using the small thumbnail files that it generates internally to loading the whole original image in order to display a bigger thumbnail of it. That slows things way down. Make your thumbnail images as small as you can stand. On most monitors, at least four thumbnails across the window, and more on many monitors, is necessary to assure that only thumbnail files are loaded at startup. Experiment.
3) Dividing a huge library into several smaller libraries is far and away the best speedup option in iPhoto 4.x and earlier. Unfortunately iPhoto doesn't provide a way to do so while retaining all the original metadata for each picture. You have to export all the images you want to place in a new library, then import them into a newly-created library. You can then designate the library you wish to open each time you launch iPhoto, by holding down the Option key while you launch it.

My iPhoto Library is huge - over 800GB

Hello, I'm running Yosemite on a new Mac mini (late 2014) with iPhoto 9.6. My single iPhoto Library file is over 800GB at this point.
I would love some best practices on how to manage this file as it is getting big and I'm afraid the file will get corrupted - it's also hard to manage backups (I have redundant backups on Time Machine and external HDD. I already had to restore the file once from a backup.
Could you please provide some options on:
1) how to parse out the existing iPhoto Library to smaller sizes (i.e. one file per year?)
2) should I upgrade to Aperture or Lightroom? Would this help with anything?
3) I assume I should start a new iPhoto Library starting in 2015?
I'm sure this is an FAQ - please point me to some good posts, if available. Thanks in advance.

it's also hard to manage backups (I have redundant backups on Time Machine and external HDD. I already had to restore the file once from a backup.
The Time Machine backups should be automatic, if you include the drive with your iPhoto in your regular Time Machine backup. The second backup to an external drive would best be done with a cloning application that can do incremental backups like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper, so only the first backup would take a long time.
Could you please provide some options on:
1) how to parse out the existing iPhoto Library to smaller sizes (i.e. one file per year?)
iPhoto Library Manager could do that - the full, paid version. But splitting your library would make your library less useful, since you can no longer search all photos at once. Having to switch between libraries is tedious.
2) should I upgrade to Aperture or Lightroom? Would this help with anything?
I don't have much experience with Lightroom. Upgrading to aAperture is useful, if you want advanced editing options and more ways to search a large library based on metadata tags. An Aperture library is easier to navigate, if you take the time to explore Aperture's advanced features. Aperture supports to manage huge libraries distributed across several drives. But upgrading to a professional application would only be necessary, if there are things that you would want to do in iPhoto, that iPhoto cannot do. Aperture can open your iPhoto library without any need to migrate, and iPhoto can open the Aperture library. Only problem, apple announced that neither Aperture nor iPhoto will be further developed. Apple to replace Aperture and iPhoto with Photos for OS X early next year | 9to5Mac
3) I assume I should start a new iPhoto Library starting in 2015?
See my answer to your first question.

Where has my iPhoto library gone?

I have downloaded the update for iphoto 11. When I opened the app, I found that ALL of my photo's had gone Where are they likely to be? Can I get them back? I hope so, because I don't have them backed up (very stupid of me)
I have read and tried some of the various solutions, but so far, nothing has worked. It was suggested that I update my library, but I don't know how to do this.
I think I've messed up somewhere, because now when I open iphoto it says:
To use iphoto ’11, you need to upgrade your photo library.
The upgrade might take several minutes, depending on the number of photos in your library
It then gives you an option to quit or continue. I select continue and then it says:
You can’t open your current photo library using this version of iPhoto.
You have made changes to your photo library using a newer version of iPhoto.
Please quit and use the latest version of iPhoto.
I select quit and then nothing.
Help!

Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back.
Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

Why does old iPhoto library show that it's been updated?

I 'backed up' my iPhoto library a few months ago by dragging it to and creating a copy on an external drive. I never used that extra, copied library. I continued using the one in my home Pictures folder on my hard drive.
I am moving stuff around for extra hard drive space when I recognize my iPhoto library on my external drive (just as I left it, I'd just forgotten about it). So for kicks, I clicked on GET INFO for that file so that I could compare it to my current iPhoto library.
Both were 'created' on the same day in 2009. The old one was a little smaller than the active one. Fine.
Interestingly, my backup copy said that it was Modified: Yesterday 5:30pm.
my current library said that it was Modified: Today 10:10pm.
QUESTION: Why was my unused, backup copy of iPhoto Library modified yesterday when I haven't accessed that file, clicked on the icon, or even remembered that it was there (until today)?
I appreciate any insight you may have. While not a burning issue, my interest is piqued. THANKS!

Have you rebooted since the deletions. That will empty a number of caches and may restore the freed up space. Also open the iPhoto Library package with the Finder as shown in this screenshot
locate the iPod Photo Cache folder and delete its contents. Make no other changes to the contents of the iPHoto LIbrary Package.
OT

Why does my iPhoto library keep losing thumbnails?

I own an external Hard Drive containing my photographs and in the past 2 weeks, my iPhoto thinks it's a good idea to lose all of my thumbnails for my photographs.
When it tries to rebuild itself, nothing happens and remains the same and when I do it myself it's the same thing with no result. Had to create a new library but lost all of my photographs and when I redirected to my original library all photo's appeared!
Thought it was my hard drive but it seems to be working fine as my music library is on there too and seems to be working fine?
Is this an issue synonymous with iPhoto and has anyone experienced this. As a freelance photographer, this is rather annoying!
Thanks for reading,
Stevie.

Thanks for the info guys.
The Format is Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Just to let you know, my iPhoto Library did the same thing again where all thumbnails were missing. When I select an album to view, the pictures appears as cut outs similar to when first importing.
To resolve this I had to select another Library I had setup then re-select my original library where all of my photographs appeared.
Really not liking this system as I'm worried it may cost me money in losing the work of my clients. Appreciate your words of wisdom and advice; one and all.

"Referenced" iPhoto Library becoming bloated...?

Hello,
My iPhoto library is "referenced" (ie. iPhoto does not copy the images when importing) to my RAW image library which is manually organized outside the iPhoto library. I do zero edits, etc. to the images within iPhoto (I do all editing via Adobe Camera RAW and Photoshop).
At the same time, I've only just created a new iPhoto library (again, a referenced library) and have just completed importing 8+ gigs of shoots from this year (all RAW images). Again, I have done zero edits on these images and haven't even opened them in Adobe Camera RAW or Photoshop.
Yet, this referenced iPhoto library is now sitting on my HD at a size of 3GB. I understand it still stores the JPG previews in the iPhoto library, but 3GB? As well, when I open the library (via "Show Package Contents") I see a large number of "modified" images (as well as the original JPG previews and aliases to the linked images).
First off, any ideas why I have so many "modified" images when I haven't done any modifications? And second, any ideas why my library is 3GB in size when it's only a referenced library?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Kristin.

Do you have auto-rotate on your cameras? If so, this is just a flag, the files are not rotated. However, on import, iPhoto sees the flag and reads it as an instruction to rotate the image, which it does - hence a modified version of the pic.
Solution? Rotate before importing or turn off auto-rotate on your cameras.
Regards
TD

Why has my iPhoto book disappeared

From a google search it looks like my experience is pretty common. I spend days working on a book and then it suddenly ceases to exist on iphoto. I am using my new macbook pro so it must be the recent iphoto edition. Tried alt/command reload but to no avail. Really really annoying that it seems to be a common problem and it isn't yet fixed.
Anyone know a reliable alternative product to produce books and get them printed in Australia? I don't think I will trust iphoto again.
cheers, Bill

Why has it disappeared? Some form of Library corruption.
Simple solution: Restore from your bck up.
Otherwise: Ths won't get your book back - that's what the back up is for - but it should prevent the issue recurring. Download iPhoto Library Manager and use its rebuild function. This will create a new library based on data in the albumdata.xml file. Not everything will be brought over - no slideshows, books or calendars, for instance - but it should get all your albums and keywords back.
Because this process creates an entirely new library and leaves your old one untouched, it is non-destructive, and if you're not happy with the results you can simply return to your old one.

Why has my iPhoto Library become huge ?

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