#How delete mac photos library free

Each app makes certain assumptions (with your guidance) as to what should be called a “duplicate.” You can make those assumptions strict, or loosen them to catch images that are extremely similar. That’s why lost photo recovery tools are almost as popular as duplicate removers.Įxercising caution when using duplicate photo tools can be challenging.

Exercise Extreme Cautionīefore going any further in this How-To, read this carefully:īe very careful (yes, that’s bold, underline, and italics all at the same time) before deleting any of your “duplicate” photos, particularly in bulk. One of these libraries may be the only record you have of precious memories, and making the choice to just dump a giant collection of images can be calamitous. The duplicate eliminating tools below turn what could be days of agonizing hunting-and-pecking into a mostly automated hour or two of deleting unneeded images. If your libraries are this big, you have a lot of potential to recover hard drive space.īut even if your photo library is smaller, there’s a very good chance that there are duplicate images inside, swelling what could be a manageable collection into something needlessly bigger.

#How delete mac photos library free

GrandPerspective, the free disk space mapper I recommended last week, quickly shows just how out of control the photo libraries have become: my OS X Photos and Aperture libraries are the two huge blocks on the left, consuming 1/3 of all used space on the drive. I personally like to see disk information presented visually rather than mathematically. If you do the math relative to your hard drive’s size, you’ll understand how much photo libraries are weighing down your computer: they were consuming around 1/4 of my iMac’s 1TB of drive space. A window will pop up with a number, which in my Mac’s case was over 236GB between a number of different photo libraries - Apple’s Photo Booth, Aperture, iPhoto, and Photos, just to name a few. The simplest technique is to open a Finder window and right-click the Pictures folder under Favorites, choosing Get Info.

If you’re not sure just how much space your photo collection is consuming on your Mac, there are two ways to figure it out. I’ve used both apps, as well as many others, and can help you choose the one that’s best for your needs… That’s an incredible amount of wasted space attributable to duplicates, so it’s no surprise that a $1 utility called Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro has recently become the #1 paid Mac App Store app, while a superior alternative called PhotoSweeper ($10) is in the top 50. After installing OS X 10.10.3, the new Photos app converted my 90GB Aperture library into a 126GB Photos library, and left both on my hard drive. Particularly after installing OS X 10.10.3 with Apple’s new Photos app, you might be surprised to learn that you’ve lost a lot of hard drive space, and that there are suddenly tons of duplicate photos on your Mac. Today’s How-To is focused on something very specific but with a lot of optimization potential: trimming down your Mac’s photo library. I’ve focused a lot over the last few months on helping readers to speed up and optimize Apple’s Macs - everything from adding RAM to recovering hard drive space and upgrading old hard drives to faster SSDs.