how reduce the size of all photos in my iPhoto library?
My iPhoto libary is 58 Gigs. They are all snapshots, nothing professional. Most of the photos were taken at 12megapixels because that's the default setting on the camera.
I'm sure they will all look fine if they were reduced to 5megapixels.
Is there a way in iPhoto to reduce the size of all photos in the Library to smaller?
Before you take this (drastic) step, consider a couple of things.
- Make sure the trash in iPhoto has been emptied -- not everyone realises this needs to be done, and it can take gigs of space.
- iPhoto creates a duplicate image when it rotates an image, and the original is not required. I'm not sure if there's an easy manual way to remove these, but I use CleanMyMac (http://macpaw.com/cleanmymac). It has a free trial and it will save a large amount of space.
- If you're worried about performance due to the size of the library, consider splitting it up helped me. I got to about 60gb, and it was very slow, so I used iPhoto Library Manager (http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/) to split it (I split into 1 library per year)
Mac's built-in Automator can reduce image sizes.
- Open Automator (inside
/Applications). - Choose Application as the document type.
- Click "Photos" in the Left Column.
- Drag "Scale images" into the Actions Area.
- Click Add.
- Choose Scale image "By Percentage."
- Choose 50%.
- Click Run.
- Click OK.
- Click Save in the Automator File Menu.
- Name it image
resize 50%.app. It saves to Applications Folder. - Double-Click the icon in Applications.
- Right-Click the app in the dock and select Keep in Dock.
- Now, any image you drag onto this Dock icon will Duplicate and Reduce image Size by 50% (so 12 MegaPixels will become 6 MegaPixels).
Consider storing your photos on an external hard drive or USB flash drive of proper capacity. You can also ignore iPhoto, and store all your images in the "Photos" folder. Use Image Capture to import new images from your Camera or Camera's Memory Card.
Also, when taking photos in your 12 megapixel camera, go in the Settings menu on there and change the capture size to a lower megapixel Size. If you have a large memory card, you can take the same photo in several different sizes.