iPhoto: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. iPhoto File Management

For years, iPhoto fans experienced the heartache of iPhoto Overload—the syndrome in which the program gets too full of photos, winds up gasping for RAM, and acts as if you’ve slathered it with a thick coat of molasses. And for years, true iPhoto fans adopted an array of countermeasures to keep the speed up, including splitting their iPhoto libraries into several smaller chunks.

These days iPhoto is faster (see the box on Demystifying 64-bit) and can manage a whopping one million pictures per library, so such drastic measures aren’t generally necessary. And with the plummeting cost of external hard drives, backing up your iPhoto library isn’t the painful process that it used to be.

Nonetheless, learning how iPhoto manages its library files is still a worthy pursuit. It’s the key to burning your photos—or an exported slideshow (Exporting a Saved Slideshow)—to CD or DVD, and transferring them to other machines, as well as swapping photo libraries and merging them together.

iPhoto Backups

Unfortunately, bad things can happen to digital photos. They can be accidentally deleted with a slip of your pinkie. They can become mysteriously corrupted and subsequently unopenable. They can get mangled by a crashed hard drive and lost forever. Losing one-of-a-kind family photos can be extremely painful—and in some documented cases, even marriage-threatening. So if you value your digital photos (and your relationships), you should back them up regularly, perhaps after ...