Friday, August 12, 2011

Autumn captures - and some further words about iPhoto

Yesterday I solved a problem with iPhoto consuming excessive amounts of disk space on the iMac. iPhoto didn't remove the deleted files when told to do so - they were left hiding in the iPhoto Library, resulting in about 200 GB of wasted disk space.

Everything seems to work well now, and iPhoto is faster than before. In fact, it is much, much faster, for example when importing photographs.

Today I realized where the problems came from. Namely, I upgraded to iPhoto 9.0 (aka iPhoto '11) at about the same time when iPhoto stopped removing the deleted files. I think the upgrade went somehow wrong. This may be due to some occult circumstances, or the problem may be widespread.

Anyway, there seems to be some differences in the internal folder structure of the iPhoto Library now and before. There were some symbolic links to other directories (namely, Data and Originals) which are missing from the new iPhoto Library which was generated from scratch. Also, in the new iPhoto Library there is a "com.apple.iPhoto.plist" file which was missing from the old.

Well, I do hope iPhoto is now fixed. It is a bit worrisome that such things happen. I have been thinking about switching to Aperture (which directly supports LX5 RAW, by the way), but that would mean learning a new way of working.

Anyway, the dangers of iPhoto running amok are small compared to traffic. Today I noticed a guy who was talking into a mobile phone (not hands-free) and smoking, at the same time as he was driving. The phone was in his left hand and the cigaret in his right. And he was regularly ashing (is that the right word?) the cigaret out of the car window.

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