A script to trash an iPhoto Album and its images

Nov 16, '03 11:55:00AM

Contributed by: pwharff

Have you ever used iPhoto's built in "Burn" feature to backup or archive albums to CD or DVD? Then you tell yourself "Now that I have backed up my albums, I want to delete them from iPhoto to save space and make iPhoto snappier." Or, you want to delete an ablum and it's images because it already exists in another Photo Library through the use of apps like iPhoto Buddy.

PROBLEM: When you delete an album from iPhoto, it deletes the album only, the pictures still reside in your Photo Library, and therefore are still taking up space on your hard drive. You might think, "I'll just go to the photo Library and delete them from there." It's not that simple -- what if your album or albums consist of images that are scattered all throughout your Library? Finding every photo accurately would take time.

SOLUTION: I wrote a shell script to assist in the trashing of iPhoto albums (moves albums and images to the trash). Also, for those who use iPhoto Buddy (or similar librarian type app), I have written the script so that it asks you which Library you would like to delete the album from; you can also delete multiple albums at once.

INSTRUCTIONS: Simply download the iphoto-album-annihilator script. Unzip it (Safari may do this for you). Open the Terminal. Go to the location in which you unzipped it. For example:

cd ~/Desktop

Then run the script by typing:

./iphoto-album-annihilator

Follow the easy on-screen instructions. Don't worry, the script will not delete albums automatically; you get to choose which albums you would like to delete. You can also move this script to /usr/bin to have access to it at any time. Trust me, this script has made my life much much easier for my neighbor and I in the past couple of months (we were testing!), and it will make things much easier for you, too. Hopefully Apple will provide this functionality in future versions of iPhoto, just as they have already done for iTunes.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this script, but this is one of the most-often-asked questions I get via email, so I figured it was worth sharing one possible solution here.]

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