Is it necessary to have picture files saved in Finder and in iPhoto?

Asked by hellolulu (49

) March 2nd, 2011

Hi!
I’m new to Mac and have a quick question about saving my picture files. When I first got the MacBook, I copied my huge number of picture files into Finder (I treated Finder like the “My Pictures” folder on Windows computers). So then a while later I wanted to use iPhoto so I imported all of the pictures from Finder to iPhoto.
The problem is, now my 500GB hard drive is nearly full! I think that when I imported the pictures to iPhoto I may have doubled all of my pictures – is this true? Should I delete all of my pictures in Finder and would they be safe in just iPhoto?
Thank you for your help! I’m so afraid of messing up my pictures!

Observing members: 0

Composing members: 0

2 Answers

Yes, you doubled them. You can safely delete the photos “in Finder” (in reality, on your desktop.) iPhoto stores pictures in /Users/yourusername/Pictures/iPhoto Library.

crisw (14145

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…

If your pictures are valuable to you (and I’m guessing they are) you should think about storing copies on 3 separate drives. Every hard drive will fail, and if that’s the drive with your only copy of your photos, then you’re lost.

You could copy the individual files or your entire iPhoto library to external drives or DVD. I would then use TimeMachine to copy my data onto a second external drive.

simpleD (3644

)“Great Answer” (0

) Flag as…