Sunday 13 January 2013

Managing Multiple iPhoto Libraries


The Macbook Air is a wonderful laptop. It is blisteringly fast, amazingly light, brilliant screen, looks awesome, but…

… it has an infuriatingly small solid state hard drive (SSD). I went for a 128gb model, it was a hefty price jump up to the next size of 256gb. Even at that larger size it would be just over half of what my old souped up MacBook could hold.

In general I live a pretty cloud based existence. I stream my music from Spotify, I have my old mp3 collection backed up and stored by iTunes Match, my email is held by Gmail, I use google docs. But one area I just couldn't get a hold of was digital photos. Slowly but surely I accumulated over 40gb of the stuff, clogging up my svelte SSD.

Naively I thought it should be a pretty simple task to siphon off the older less relevant content onto an external hard drive, but iPhoto had other ideas. iPhoto manages all of your photos within a single overarching library. It isn't a trivial task to break it up into sections and have those sections live in different places.

However where there is a will, there is a way.

It turns out if you press and hold the option key while opening iPhoto you get to see a secret menu that lets you manage multiple libraries. You can create a new library or choose the library you wish iPhoto to boot up there and then. By default iPhoto will try to load the last library you accessed if you open the application as normal bypassing this menu.



So with a brand new fresh library created 'iPhoto Archive', I set about the next challenge, getting the older content into this new home. Again not as trivial as you might hope. There is no magic bullet for this so you have to do the following:


  1. Export all the files from the old library to a folder of your choosing. Be sure to choose to subfolder them by Event Name. This will ensure they dont just get imported into the new library as one big event.

  1. Quit iPhoto
  2. Open iPhoto using the option key
  3. Choose the new library to boot
  4. Import all files into new library
  5. Delete files in desktop folder
  6. Delete files from old iPhoto library


As I was perilously close to running out of space this whole process was complicated by the fact I had to break it into bite sized chunks as there wasn't enough space for me to have 3 versions of the same file co-existing.

And voila, you should have yourself a nicely partitioned library and some reclaimed hard disk space to boot!

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