iPhoto Diet

Mar 03

iPhoto Diet

iPhoto is great for managing your photo library and performing basic image enhancement, but to keep things simple it does some funny things behind your back, creating multiple copies of photos and generating unnecessary folders and files in your library. And if you’ve ever experienced problems and had to reimport your pictures (as I have), you know how difficult it can be to sort through hundreds, or even thousands, of pictures to eliminate duplicates.

iPhoto Diet can scan multiple Libraries, finding duplicate photos, removing backups and rotated or modified pictures, stripping thumbnails, identifying photos that haven’t been added to albums, and purging extraneous folders and files from your library.This saves hard drive space and lets you get more on a backup CD or DVD. You can run iPhoto Diet manually, or (using Cron; see the iPhoto Diet ReadMe) set it to run automatically at scheduled times.

I wish I had used iPhoto Diet when I had to reimport pictures into iPhoto after my library became irretrievably corrupted. I manually eliminated duplicates and trashed them, only to discover that I had accidently deleted some of the original pictures and kept low resolution thumbnails.

When I ran iPhoto Diet on my 9.5 GB library, it found 25 redundant duplicates, 3 hidden files and 69 empty folders, 61 thumbnails and 90 imported duplicates, a total of 356.9 MB.