Where iPhoto Keeps Your Files
Having entrusted your vast collection of digital photos to iPhoto, you may find yourself wondering, “Where’s iPhoto putting all those files, anyway?”
Most people slog through life, eyes to the road, without ever knowing the answer. After all, you can preview, open, edit, rotate, copy, export, and print all your photos right in iPhoto, without actually opening a folder or double-clicking a single JPEG file.
Even so, it’s worthwhile to know where iPhoto keeps your pictures on the hard drive. Armed with this information, you can keep those valuable files backed up and avoid the chance of accidentally throwing them away six months from now when you’re cleaning up your hard drive.
A Trip to the Library
Whenever you import pictures into iPhoto, the program makes copies of your photos, always leaving your original files untouched.
When you import from a camera, iPhoto leaves the photos right where they are on its memory card (unless you use the “Erase” option).
When you import from the hard drive, iPhoto leaves the originals in whichever folders they’re in. As a result, transferring photos from your hard drive into iPhoto more than doubles the amount of disk space they take up. In other words, importing 1 GB of photos requires an additional 1 GB of disk space, because you’ll end up with two copies of each file: the original, and iPhoto’s copy of the photo. In addition, iPhoto creates a separate thumbnail version of each picture, consuming about another 10 K to 20 ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access