iPhoto is eating up my Hard Drive

[roland.g]

Can someone please explain to me why when I tried to import photos into iPhoto, which are a folder of 700 mB, that after importing less than 1/3 of them, it took up 2.5 gigs of space?

I understand with thumbnails and other things related to iPhoto, it will take up some space larger than the file, but this is ridiculous. I had over 3.5 gigs of free space on my drive when I started, and after only 78 of 257 photos, I am down to 1 gig of drive space!

 

[ham_man]

Can someone please explain to me why when I tried to import photos into iPhoto, which are a folder of 700 mB, that after importing less than 1/3 of them, it took up 2.5 gigs of space?

I understand with thumbnails and other things related to iPhoto, it will take up some space larger than the file, but this is ridiculous. I had over 3.5 gigs of free space on my drive when I started, and after only 78 of 257 photos, I am down to 1 gig of drive space!

You can either treat the problem (iPhoto) or the symptom (no free space), and seeing as you don't have the source code to iPhoto, you may want to look into getting an external hard drive.

Either way, good luck!

 

[zim]

I am not positive but doesn't iPhoto's virtual memory requirements increase as more photos are added? Curious to know what your drive space is after a restart.. either way, I agree with ham_man, time to invest in an external.

 

[roland.g]

actually I found some threads that said that iPhoto 5 has issues with certain newer cameras and creates larger .data files. By deleting those three files from the library, it rectified the problem. I had to import the photos 50 at a time and repeat the process, but in the end the 257 pics took 750 mb, wheres after each 50 photo import, I was losing 2 gigs of space. I do have a 120 gig external. But I'm not going to bother relocating my iPhoto library to it since I am getting a new Mac after the WWDC announcements. And hopefully iPhoto 6 resolves this issue, as well from what I hear, it allows you to keep all photos organized in folders as you would have it, and doesn't copy them into the old system. That means not having to export them when you need them for other reasons.

 

[TrenchMouth]

i second the "check memory usage after restart" suggestion.

do you have FileVault turned on?

That is too much memory usage for what you are describing. A bigger harddrive would just allow the problem to get larger. No time better than the present to move to the latest version though.