Use iPhoto or the utilities mentioned above to make changes to the library if necessary.Find and delete duplicate files in seconds with Easy Duplicate Finder™! With this tool you can recover gigabytes of space, make your computer faster, and organize your files.

The mess is still there.īut if you must peek, just browse. If you’re curious what’s inside, right-click (or control-click) on your iPhoto Library and choose Show Package Contents. The iPhoto Library is just a Package file, which is essentially a camouflaged folder. Now there’s just one huge thing on disk, and don’t you mess with it. As of iPhoto ’08 the iPhoto Library folders are hidden inside a single monolithic file called iPhoto Library. Over time Apple realized too many people were mucking around, so they came up with a solution to the problem. IPhoto versions prior to ’06 allowed you to directly browse and modify this data via the Finder. I’ve worked with quite a few clients who have tried a bit of de-duplication and pruning of their iPhoto libraries to free up disk space, and wound up with a bigger mess than when they started. Modifying these files outside of iPhoto can cause data loss or library corruption. There is a lot of redundant data and copies of things from eons past.

There are folders named Contents, Data, Modified and Originals, caches, thumbs, data segments, et. The organization of these files is confusing at best. The iPhoto Library on the disk is a collection of nested folders and files, containing your original photos, edited versions, thumbnails, etc. Any thumbnails needed by iPhoto (for low-res views in grid mode) will get recreated by the program if they are missing.ĭon’t Edit or Prune the iPhoto Library Directly Most of these appear when you import one iPhoto library into another rather than doing a clean merge.

Any events or rolls in your library that are labelled as Thumbnails can also be safely deleted.

Iphoto delete duplicates