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Get Back Space on a Mac Laptop

by Jon Chase on December 16, 2009 at 06:01 AM

As handy as iPhoto may be for organizing your digital snaps, it's an absolute glutton for hard drive space. The application alone takes up a half gigabyte of space, and even just a few thousand photos can take up tens of gigabytes -- a considerable amount considering the typically smaller size of laptop hard drives. As it turns out, that's because iPhoto keeps an original copy of every photo you import, as well as full-size copies of every edit you make to them (e.g., cropping, rotating, and color correction). If you're comfortable with your photo library as it is, and don't think you'll need to revert to the unedited original images ever again, hit up this link to read how to delete them. (Obviously, photos that haven't been edited are left untouched.)

Note: As always, you should make a backup of all your photos on a separate hard drive before attempting this, just in case something goes awry.

Tags: delete originals, DeleteOriginals, iphoto diet, iphoto storage space, IphotoDiet, IphotoStorageSpace, techtip, terminal, top

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