iPhoto Library Huge? Delete your movies!
Posted: March 26, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized 23 Comments »My iPhoto library has grown to over 30 Gigabytes. We’ve got nearly 10 years of photos in the Library, but still, that’s a massive library size for a person, who until today when I bought a dSLR, always used the stock settings on our camera.
A had a sneaking suspicion of the root cause of my iPhoto library growth, however. A few years back, instead of having a separate camcorder that used DV videotape, we started shooting all our video on our point-and-shoot. iPhoto by default imports videos from the camera, and so over the past 3 or 4 years we seem to have accumulated 20 Gigabytes of videos (about 200 videos shot) out of a 30GB library. Extreme!
So, in order to combat this growing file size, I took some steps to export these videos and delete the from the Library.
First Step, Find the Videos
First, we need to find the videos. Took some time to find this, but you can’t do an advanced find or anything sophisticated in iPhoto. However, you can create a Smart Album. Go to File -> New Smart Album, and set it up like this:
Second Step, Export the Videos
iPhoto is great for managing a large number of small files. However, because it manages files all inside one .pkg file, it means once it gets large (20-50 gigabytes) it becomes a royal pain to move around. Best to keep a large number of small files inside it, and manage the large files somewhere else on your file system. To do that, lets export all the videos out of Library. First hit select the Smart Album we just created, I called mine videos. Next, hit Cmd-A to select all the videos in your Smart Album, then Go to File -> Export and make your window look like this:
Select a directory to export them to, and you’ll find all your original movies in that folder after the export is complete.
Third, Delete the Videos
Now, it’s time to clear out the videos from the Library. However, this is not as straight forward as it would seem. Attempting to delete the videos from the Library does not work as expected. iPhoto will simply beep at you if you hit Cmd-Delete, or if you try to select Delete from the menu you’ll find it greyed out. Instead, you need to do a Cmd-Opt-Delete from the Keyboard and this will allow you to delete the videos from the Smart Album. Again, go the Smart Album we created in the first step, then hit Cmd-A to select all the videos in the Smart Album, then hit Cmd-Opt-Delete, and it’ll prompt you to move all the videos to the trash. Hit Okay, then right click the Trash icon and choose “Empty Trash.” Quit iPhoto, and your space from your iPhoto Library will be reclaimed!
Brilliant.. thanks, have been ages faffing about.
Only wanted to delete selected video clips… but cannot make the others in the smart album play!!! How do you do that???
To play a video in an album (smart or otherwise), double click it. Worked for me.
I was just about to try to figure this out this morning because this was stumping me. THANK YOU!! My iPhoto package file is 90GB!
+1 this helped me today – thanks much. It was the cmd-opt-del combination that had me stumped.
You’re a genius. Huge help! Thanks!
I tried this but it out all my photos in the smart album and I’m afraid if I delete I wm delete all my photos
Thank you!!!
i’m doing this today thank yo very much!
Thanks! Super helpful.
Help. I exported the movies and deleted them from my movies album but the iphoto file did not shrink! Now I have no movies in iphoto and 22 more gig of duplicate movies. Suggestions? Thanks
Make sure you empty iPhoto’s trash.
My bad. Of course. Thanks for the quick reply.
Kent via iPhone
But is there a suitable tool out there for managing the videos once they’re out of iPhoto?
hi there! this almost works for me buttt even holding cmd-option-D, nothing happens other than that ‘beep’ you speak of. Any idea?
Thank you so much! I can’t believe Apple hasn’t created a real solution for this, but I so appreciate your help.
thank you so much for posting. the Cmd-Opt-Del was exactly what I needed. That super intuitive Apple interface just wasn’t so super or intuitive.
I’ve the same problem… Cmd-Opt-Del does nothing…
Any ideas?
I found that this option seems to be removed from iPhoto’11. So the best option is, once you’ve created the album, select all and create an event. Since the photos/videos can be on a single event iPhoto moves the originals. Then, just delete the new event.
Thank you SO much! I’d been trying to fix iMovie for months…yes, months. I even purchased it a second time in hopes that THAT would do the trick. But your step-by-step tutorial really did the trick for me. Thanks so much….and just in time to produce my family’s video Christmas card! Good Karma is coming your way!
You are God. This is the best iPhoto tip ever!
Thank you very much, worked like a charm!!
HI – this may be an obvious answer –
but, if I’ve backed up my entire iphoto library to an external hard drive, what is the purpose of exporting all the videos to a different directory? Is it necessary?
Clint….slightly confused. What do you mean by “Directory” as far as exporting. External drive, a folder???