Nonetheless there are some other situations involving manual photo and picture management that can benefit from removing the original iPhoto Library. If any of this sounds confusing it’s probably because it does not apply to you, and therefore you should not delete the iPhoto files.

If this is clear as mud, then a simple way to think about it is that everything is simply hard linked, it is not a duplicate, thus when you use a disk space analyzer app and it points to the library as taking up space, it may not actually being using any additional storage. That last part is critical, in these type of migrations you don’t actually need to delete iPhoto Library because it’s not taking up any significant disk space. Because the migrated library takes little additional space, you don’t need to delete the original library. When Finder reports the file size of your Photos library, it includes all your originals and previews. It may look like your remaining iPhoto or Aperture library is taking up twice the space on your hard drive, but it isn’t-your images exist only in one location, even though you may have more than one photo library.Īfter you migrate your iPhoto or Aperture library to Photos, you might feel tempted to delete your original iPhoto or Aperture library. Instead, Photos saves disk space by creating links to the original and preview versions of your images. “When you migrate a photo library from iPhoto or Aperture, the Photos app creates a new library structure but doesn’t duplicate your images. Apple explains this as follows from there support page on the topic:

An important consideration is that the iPhoto Library is not necessarily taking up disk space if you successfully imported it into Photos app, and in these situations the iPhoto Library would not need to be deleted if it is being shared with the newer Photos app. This depends, but the answer is you probably do not need to delete the iPhoto Library and probably should not.

Wait, is iPhoto Library really taking up space? Do I need to delete iPhoto Library? Removing the iPhoto Library package can help to free up disk space in some situations (but not always, more on that in a moment) but before doing this you need to be absolutely 100% certain that your pictures, photos, and videos have successfully migrated over to the Photos app and stored in the new photos library, that you have a fresh backup made of your pictures, and that you actually need to delete the original iPhoto Library package. This is usually not necessary due to how Photos importation works with iPhoto Library files, but some users with unique situations decide to do it anyway, typically if they are self managing picture files outside of the original library containers, or if they want to keep things tidy and ditch all remnants of iPhoto.

How to delete duplicates in iphoto