I was learning about iPhoto the other day in "The Missing Manual" and I found out that iPhoto keeps a backup copy of any photo to which you make any changes, even a simple rotation. With larger libraries, this will eat up a lot of HD space. In the book they suggest using iPhoto Diet to eliminate the duplicate photos, which effectively makes any changes premanent (no more "Revert to Original").
My questions are:
1) How much more HD space does iPhoto take up with these backup copies? e.g. if I do a simple rotate to each photo in my Library will the Library take up twice the space?
2) Has anyone used iPhoto Diet? If so, how did it go?
3) At what size of library would it be practical to use iPhoto Diet? e.g. I'm approching 1,000 photos, would using this program make much difference?
I looked at it the other day but was afraid to go through with it. I backed up my iPhoto library beforehand, but how do I know down the road that it didn't completely boff everything up? At that point, the backup would be obsolete and merging the new photos with old would be tedious at best.
I've got ~7000 photos in my iPhoto library so I am sure there is wasted space, but I am not willing to sacrafice integrity for disk space.
Yep, my understanding is that even a rotation causes a duplicate of the image to be created (the original).
As I do not believe iPhoto supports lossless rotation, this would mean that a rotated image cannot be rotated back to it's original position without losing something.
My wife had about 5,500 images in her iPhoto. It had become a bit sluggish. I installed iPhoto Diet. You can choose what you want it to do, so you can be cautious and run things in stages. I backed up the library and ran the app. Got rif of dupes etc. Now her iPhoto is clean and running fast again.
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My wife had about 5,500 images in her iPhoto. It had become a bit sluggish. I installed iPhoto Diet. You can choose what you want it to do, so you can be cautious and run things in stages. I backed up the library and ran the app. Got rif of dupes etc. Now her iPhoto is clean and running fast again.
You can also do library maintenance too, which may help speed things up. Hold Option and Comnand while opening iPhoto and you have the options to:
Rebuild the photos' small thumbnails
Rebuild all of the photos' thumbnails
Rebuild the iPhoto Library database
Recover orphaned photos in the iPhoto Library folder
It's also mentioned in the "Missing Manual" that the rotation is not lossless. Would it be better (in terms of having duplicates) to do all of the edits in Photoshop and then import the photos into iPhoto? If I make Photoshop my default editor for iPhoto, does iPhoto still make a duplicate in order to be able to revert to the original?
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