My iPhoto is Eating Up All My Diskspace

Date:  Aug 15, 2011

After a short vacation, and synced all my photos into the iMac, I found my iMac hard disk space quickly dropped to less than 10Gb again.  Hmmm.... who is eating up my hard disk space?

Last time, I shared with you, how I move the iOS backup folder into my NAS (i.e. Synology), this time, let's try to see what other folders are growing on my iMac.

By using an App called OmniDiskSweeper, I am able to see where all my hard disk has gone too.

As you can see clearly, out from my 280Gb hard disk on iMac, almost half of it has gone to iPhoto Library.  And inside this iPhoto Library, there are "iPod Photo Cache" and "Masters" which takes up equal size.  So, according to

The Masters are all your original photos, i.e. your raw files.  "iPod Photo Cache" folder is where iTunes stored all the optimized photos for your iPod, iPhone, iPad.  It actually takes the original photos and optimized it for display on your iOS devices.  This is another culprit that will grow when you add your photo in.

And sometimes the folder size of the iPod Photo Cache can be larger than your Masters folder.

So, now I found out that what is the problem, the solutions becomes easy.

I have a Synology (NAS) on my network.  (i.e. you can also plug in "permanently" a USB backup drive), means you do not move the USB hard disk.  Or when you sync your iOS devices, you always remember to plug in the USB hard disk.

Step 1.  Copy all files together with the "iPod Photo Cache" folder to your Synology drive.  For me, it takes about an hour to move the 61.71GB files over to the NAS drive.

Once you have done that.

Step 2.  Go to your NAS drive.  Right click on the "Ipod Photo Cache" directory you have just created.  Select "Make Alias".

An "ipod Photo Cache alias" folder will be created.  This is a soft link that point to the "iPod Photo Cache".

Step 3.  Go to your Pictures folder, and then right click on the "iPhoto Library" folder.  You cannot double click on the "iPhoto Library" as it is a package file, which will launch your iPhoto when you double click on it.  When you right click, select "Show Package Contents".

Step 4.  In here, you will see your "iPod Photo Cache" folder here.  Move it to the trash, and right click on Trash to "Empty Trash".  Before you do so, please make sure that you have completely copy everything onto your NAS drive.

Step 5.  Go back to the NAS drive folder, move (or drag) the "iPod Photo Cache alias" into your "iPhoto Library" folder.

Step 6.  Important!  Don't forget to change the "iPod Photo Cache alias" folder name into "iPod Photo Cache".

So, what you have done is to move the iPod Photo Cache folder to a NAS drive, and create an alias (or soft link) to it from the original directory.  So, when iTunes is syncing the photos, instead of sync it to your iMac hard disk, it will sync it to your NAS drive.

Once I did that, I have freed about 62Gb of hard disk space!  Yoohooooo.