Mac Photo App Says Preparing 678 Items

If you’re using the new Photos app on your Mac instead of the older iPhoto app, you most likely have a duplicate photo library floating around on your hard drive. For a lot of people, that could mean gigs and gigs of wasted storage space, especially on shared Macs with multiple migrated libraries.

Here’s how to check for multiple libraries and how to delete them…

Mac Photo App Says Preparing 678 Items Free

Before deleting your old library: Make a backup

Mac OS X occasionally gets hung up on stubborn files and refuses to easily delete them. If you can’t empty your Mac’s Trash, try some of these techniques to get rid of those nasty errors and clear out the junk. As a Mac user, you’ve probably found yourself in a situation where you needed to force empty the Trash.

While the Photos app should have imported all your photos and videos just fine, I always recommend having backups handy. Perhaps you’ll delete an old photo by accident at some point and want it back later. If you have a copy of your old iPhoto library still handy, you can pull it form there as a last resort.

I saved my old iPhoto library to my Dropbox account. You can of course use any service of your choice, or just drop it onto an external hard disk you have laying around. Regardless of how you do it, I’d highly recommend saving a copy before deleting it.

Once you’ve backed up your old iPhoto library (if you chose to do so), you can proceed with deleting it:

  1. Open a new Finder window on your Mac.
  2. Click on Pictures in the left hand navigation. If it isn’t there, just search for your pictures folder using Spotlight.
  3. You should see two libraries, one is your old iPhoto Library and one is your new Photos library.
  4. Move your iPhoto Library to your trash can and empty it.

Check the storage space on your Mac, you should notice that you have more storage space available. If you are on a shared Mac and have multiple user logins, everyone using the new version of Photos on that Mac should make sure they don’t also have duplicate libraries.

I’m not sure why Apple doesn’t create a process to delete old versions of libraries after migrating to Photos, but they should. Until that happens, you’ll have to delete your old library manually.

Give this tip a try and see how much storage space you were able to clear up. As you can see in the screens above, my old iPhoto library was over 30GB, which was definitely a healthy chunk of hard drive space that I now have back.

Your Mac storage tips?

This is one of many ways to regain storage space on your Mac without having to sacrifice losing data. But we know there are lots of others. What are some of your favorite Mac storage tips for recapturing space? We’ve love to hear them in the comments!

Update

A follower on Twitter referenced to me an article written on Six Colors pointing out that the library is actually hard-linked between versions. While this may be true when you first migrate, it seems that if you make any changes to any files and the libraries become different, splicing can and will occur.

To test this theory, I deleted my iPhoto library on my other Mac to see how much storage was freed up. For those wondering, my iPhoto library was 35.99 GB and my Photos library was 41.16 GB. You can see the before and after results on my hard disk space below. I was able to free up over 20 GB of space. So I’m not sure what I think about hard linking or how well it’s actually working between Photos and iPhoto.

App

Bottom line, if you’re short on storage space and you want to free some up, there’s really not much point in having two photo libraries floating around on your Mac. Hard linking or not, deleting the old library will free up space in almost every case.

In this article, we will discuss the best photo organizing software to Mac to manage digital images.

Sweet memories fade with time, but when captured in images, they stay with you forever. If you are fond of taking pictures, you must have a collection of hundreds and thousands of photos. Capturing moments is fun but organizing them can be an arduous task. However, if you have a photo management app for your Mac, things could get a lot easier. To know about some of them, read on!

Top 5 Best Photo Management Software for Mac To Organize Digital Photos

Organizing photos can be fun when you have a third-party app on your Mac. We have listed some of the best photo management apps for Mac.

1. CyberLink PhotoDirector 365

Mac Photo App Says Preparing 678 Items Online

Cyberlink PhotoDirector 365 is a photo management tool that not only helps you to organize your photos in a neat manner but also provides advanced editing tools. Let’s take a look at the features of the CyberLink PhotoDirector 365:

  • To manage your photos, you can categorize them with keyword tags, star ratings, smart collections, color coding, and flags.
  • The software can automatically arrange your photos on the basis of on composition, frame, time or date or you can manually organize them by simply dragging and dropping.
  • You can share both digital and hard copy photos with your friends. Moreover, you can create slideshows and upload them to YouTube.

2. Adobe Photoshop Elements 15

Mac Photo App Says Preparing 678 Items Available

Adobe Photoshop Elements 15 is a simpler and efficient way of organizing your photos on Mac.

Let’s take a look at the features of the Adobe Photoshop Elements 15:

  • With Auto Curate feature, your photos are organized according to the image quality, faces, subjects, Smart Tags and more which makes searching for images easier.
  • The software suggests you use Smart tags to your photos so that you can find the photos easily later on.
  • It also allows you to fix multiple photos at a time.

3. AfterShot Pro 2

AfterShot Pro 2 helps you in organizing and viewing all your photo collection in one place making it one of the best photo Management apps for Mac. Let’s check out all the features of AfterShot Pro 2:

  • You can edit and make other changes to one or many photos at once with powerful batch processing controls.
  • The powerful search tools, star ratings, and other tools help you quickly find photos no matter what is the size of your photo collections.
  • You can easily compare, filter and select your best photos from n number of similar looking photos

4. Unbound

One of the best photo management apps for Mac, Unbound helps you efficiently manage your photos according to your needs. Let’s take a look at the features of the Unbound:

  • You can use albums to categorize your photos. With instant search, you can locate any album within a few clicks.
  • The app can play slideshows, display EXIF information and can also use GPS location data to display photos on a map.
  • Unbound can sync your albums to your iPhone, iPad or other Macs with the help of Dropbox. So that you can upload and organize your photos from any of the devices.

5. Phase One MediaPro1

Another photo organizing software in our list is “Phase One MediaPro1”. It is a good choice if you love to keep your photo collection organized and managed. Let’s go through the features of the Phase One MediaPro1:

  • It allows you to handle photos in batch whether it is editing or renaming.
  • The app allows you to convert your RAW format images to JPEG or PNG, BMP and more to make it easy to share it across.
  • It has an auto-sort feature which uses metadata annotations to sort photos.

Mac Photo App Says Preparing 678 Items List

So, these are some of the best photo management software for Mac which you can use to Organize your digital photos on your Mac Computer. Try them and let us know which worked for you.

If you have other photo organizing software in your mind that should be in the list please mention in comment section below.

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