Of iPhoto, Photos and A Hard Drive

Back in April of 2015, I transferred all of my iPhoto pictures to the new Apple Photos.  It took awhile but the process went pretty smoothly.

A week or so back, my Apple MacBook Pro gave me a pop up box that said that the hard disk was just about full.  I thought “yeah, yeah, yeah it’s probably nothing.”  Then I tried transferring photos from my Panasonic Lumix camera over to Photos and they would not transfer over.

When I checked the storage on the hard drive, it said I had 18 GB left out of 246.  I noticed that I had not deleted the iPhoto libraries (I had two),  so I checked to see how much was being used there.  The first library showed 108 GB and the second library showed 1.9 GB.

I used logic (anyone who knows me probably questions this) and determined that if I deleted both of the iPhoto files that that would automatically give me approximately 109 GB of additional storage space.  That is logical, isn’t it?  

Not being a computer “techie,” I checked with all the computer gurus I knew and they told me it was okay to delete the iPhoto files since those pictures were transferred over to Photos and were basically duplicates.

Trepeditously, I deleted the two libraries from iPhoto, made sure the Photos files weren’t affected and then removed them from the trash.

What a piece of cake, I thought.  Then I went to see how much my hard drive storage had increased.  Uh, nothing.  The hard drive had increased zilch-o.  Nada.  Nothing.  Can I say it any other way?  Does anyone know why this would be the case?

And thus began the journey of going through every picture I have in Photos since 2008 to determine whether to delete it or keep it.  Talk about time consuming.  Haven’t seen hardly any new posts on my blog recently?  This explains why.

Looking back, it’s amazing how many ugly pictures I took.  Then there are the fuzzy ones, the ones I took from different angles 15 times to make sure the lighting was just right, the overexposed, the underexposed and even ones that I had to ask myself “who really cares?” (that’s a whole ‘nother topic …)

I never ~ and I mean never ~ thought about deleting the pictures that weren’t good.  Never had the words “storage space or hard drive” crossed my mind.  Blah.

Sure, I could just put them on a disk and when I die let some poor soul decide what to do with them all … but I’ve been that poor soul in the past, and I have to say “What’s most important to me will probably not be important to someone else.”

Good news though!  I’ve finally made it to the year 2013.  Clap, clap, clap.  Aren’t you happy for me?  Not even a wee bit?

And do you know how much storage space I have freed up?  An additional 49GB for a total of 67 free GB.   That sounds like such a pittance ~ but then, I’m not a tech guru.

Once finished, I’ll put my Photos library 1 on a disk and just work with my second library.

Lesson learned?  Get rid of the unwanted photos shortly after you download them. It will save you a lot of time and heartache in the long run.

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