I have a bunch of photos and videos in iPhoto and I'd like to find the largest videos particularly to see if I can delete them to make some space. It seems strange that I can't find an option to do this in iPhoto - am I missing something?
2 Answers
No, there is no way to sort on size in iPhoto. From your context I guess you mean filesize. In iPhoto, size means the dimensions on the Photo (length by breadth, measured in pixels) - see the Export dialogue, for instance. iPhoto is all about the images and not the files that contain them, so I'm not surprised. It's a $15 app, you get a lot, but not everything.
In a round-about way it can be done - although not from right within the iPhoto GUI - if you know the approximate dates or album names on the files you would like to delete. It's likely not as fast as you were hoping for as you have to go date by date (which I guess isn't helpful if every video was taken/imported on a different day), but it might be faster than examining the metadata for each and every photo/video within iPhoto within these albums (depending on your situation).
Be very careful not to delete or move anything while in this folder other than the photos/videos you wish to get rid of otherwise you could break the library file. I would also STRONGLY suggest backing up your iPhoto library before trying this method.
- Quit iPhoto
- Locate your iPhoto library (default file path is usually ~/Pictures/iPhoto library)
- Right Click > Show Package Contents
- Locate the "Masters" folder in the list and open it
- Folders are broken down by date and subfolders are usually by album
- Once you've located an album arrange files by size using Finder's view menu
- Move any files you no longer wish to keep to a new folder on your Desktop
- Relaunch iPhoto and ensure that everything is working correctly (and notice that the files you moved are gone!)
- If you're comfortable with how everything looks you can now move that folder on your Desktop to the Trash and empty the Trash to regain the hard drive space
- If you now have a problem with iPhoto I would just restore the iPhoto library from the backup you made before starting this process! (You'll be back to square 1, yes, but at least iPhoto will look proper again.)
As you can see you still have to go through each album, but at least you can see the file size of every file within that album all at once without having to inspect each photo and video individually.
Hope this speeds things up a bit for anyone with this same task in mind!
