Clean Up Mac Photos Library

Back up the library in Photos on Mac. Even if you use iCloud Photos, it’s important that you always back up your library locally using one of the following methods. Use Time Machine: After you set up Time Machine, it automatically backs up the files on your Mac. Clean Up Your Photo Collection with Free Tools. You may also. Give us your Extreme Photo Library Makeover story in the comments. That way you can be more confident in your moves to clean.
Mar 26, 2009 I need to understand that better. No doubt I need to arrange several libraries on external drives and clean up my native drive. I need some help learning to do that. It says that my Mac HD has 698.32 GB Capacity with 93.48 GB available. Would like to learn how to back up my library before I start getting rid of duplicates and splitting up the. May 31, 2016 Cleanz is the simplest and beautiful way to clean up your photo library. Select photos by album, date, devices (screenshots) - Clean, minimal design - Simple, interactive and fun to use - Swipe down to trash - Swipe up to keep - 3D Touch. / Press and Hold for a quick look - Live photo support. Vincent Danen explains how to clean up your iPhoto library to make it faster. Depending on the size of your photo library, speeds can be improved moderately or significantly with a just a few tweaks. Jun 07, 2015 You can still use your original photo library with iPhoto (version 9.6.1, as of this writing) and Aperture (version 3.6) after you've migrated it to Photos. Just bear in mind that any changes you make in iPhoto or Aperture will be resident only in those applications. Oct 22, 2019 People Also Read: How to Clean Up Mac Storage How to Speed Up Mac. Part III: Deleting Duplicates Images Within iPhoto Using A Duplicate Cleaner. This is done with a tool called iMyMac’s Duplicate Finder. You can easily locate duplicate photos using this tool to help you get rid of unnecessary photos.
Gary, I have been trying to clean up my photo collection on my iPad. I had been doing a sync with iTunes to my iMac where the main library is. That collection is around 30,000 images. I decided I wanted to do the sync with just some albums. So, I did a sync, checked selected albums and just a few people. After the sync, nothing changed. I had the same number of images and an album with “people from my Mac”. I have iOS 10.3.3 and OS X 10.12.6. The iPad is not at capacity with 15 GB free of 128GB. However, I would like to reduce the number of photos. How do I go about the sync?
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Mike
When photography was print, it was an expensive hobby or career. A rare few made that leap from taking pictures for fun to making a living from it, which often required talent, a little money, or a lucky first client or two.
It is a lot easier to get into photography these days. Digital tools mean we all have something on us that could take an award-winning photograph, even if you don’t invest in the latest 40 megapixel SLR.
But for those of us who are snapping away on a regular basis, either professionally or for fun and work - such as bloggers, vloggers and even writers — aren't we all content creators in some way?! — we end up with a lot of pictures on our Macs. Whatever Mac you have, they are perfect machines for storing, editing and publishing, which is great, except for the fact they can soon get full to bursting with images.
Best ways to find duplicate and similar photos
Let’s face it — sometimes it takes dozens of pictures just to get the perfect one, which is easy and free when using a digital camera. Compared to film, when you had to think about every picture, since every single one cost money. Now you can snap away with abandon, and even if none of them are exactly perfect — not a problem, when you've got Photoshop and other handy tools. Almost anything can be removed, added or tweaked with a few clicks.
Duplicate Image Finder
Get a huge set of top apps for finding and removing duplicates in minutes. Best utilities in one pack, give it a go!
We can end up with dozens of duplicates, especially when shooting in raw, and then once you start editing, dozens more could be generated. All of this takes up space, and it can take a lot of time to sort and delete manually, or you can try a few of these shortcuts.
Find and remove duplicate photos manually
Every photo is special. Okay, maybe not every single photo — but the ones you want to keep are, whereas the duplicates are just taking up space.
Manual detection and deletion is one approach.
The faster way: use a smart duplicate photo finder
Or you can get Gemini app - it's a smart duplicate finder and cleaner for macOS. Just let it search, select and then, with your permission, zap the duplicates to free up loads of space on your Mac. Here's how to get rid of extra files (both duplicate and similar-looking photos):
- Open duplicate finder.
- Choose where to scan. This can be a folder or your whole Mac.
- Hit Scan.
- View the results and choose which duplicates and similars to remove.
When scanning for photos, make sure to scan in the photos library folder, or your documents folder and any attached external hard drives for images, instead of the Photos app. The icons look similar, but you’ll find what you need in those folders since that will also remove any duplicates lingering within the app automatically.
Once that is done, click on Select Duplicates, and Gemini moves them all to the Trash. So don't worry if you’ve accidentally deleted a finished edit instead of another duplicate - you can easily get them back. And then, once you are sure everything in the trash is junk, use CleanMyMac to shred the trash, which is a great way to really save some space.

Now, a little about the similar files and what they are. Similars are files that have strong resemblance but are a little different: images taken from one angle, dozens of identical selfies, music files with different bitrate etc. This duplicate cleaner has a smart algorithm that can identify and group them, so you'll only have to click on the ones you'd like to keep.
Open your Home Folder in Finder. If you don’t know how to do that, simply choose Home from Finder’s Go menu located in the top menu bar (Go - Home) or simply press “Command + Shift + H” on your keyboard.Right click (secondary click) in any blank area and select “Show View Options.” You can also access this by selecting Show View Options in the View menu or by simply pressing “Command + J” on your keyboard.In the second to last section, the last option will be “Show Library Folder.” Make sure this box is checked. How to view library mac.
Duplicate photo remover by folders
Another way to get rid of duplicates is using a duplicate remover in Disk Drill, Mac users favorite, because it's an app primarily designed to recover lost data. However, it has multiple great features apart from its main benefit and one of those is removing duplicates.
The process is near identical: install and launch Disk Drill, choose directory for scanning, review results and remove duplicated files that were found on your Mac.
Move Photo Library Mac
Now that your pictures are organized, you probably want to keep the ones you’ve got tidy and in order. Inboard, also available from Setapp — along with Gemini — is a handy way to manage your entire picture gallery and images workflow, which should save you hours of time in the future.
Here's how to clean up your photo library when the duplicates are gone:
- Open Inboard app.
- Drag a photo into the Inboard window, and the app will save the image in your library.
From then on you can tag photos so that it will be easier to search in the future, make folders in the Inboard app and place images of a category in the folder, sort by date and title, and lots of other things.
Clean Up Photos Library Mac
That's about it concerning image organization. Photo duplicate removal is an extremely efficient technique for freeing up some room on your Mac's hard drive. Plus, it gets a ton easier to work with all your photo library when you only keep the good stuff. All the apps in this article are on Setapp subscription, in a single suite. So go ahead and explore them! Cheers.