Conserving memory on my new macbook?

iPhoto makes a thumbnail (a small version) of the image that is really small and won’t add significantly to your hard drive getting filled up faster. I just checked and one photo I have the thumbnail is 64KB and the original is 3.1MB. The thumbnail is about 2% of the original file size.

It makes the thumbnails so it doesn’t have to load all of the huge image files when you scroll through them. When you view the image full size is when it loads the big file. This makes iPhoto much faster.

If you edit your photos in iPhoto it does make a copy so you still have the original. That can start to add up.

edit :: I wanted to ask if you have GarageBand installed? Do you ever use it? All the sample sounds and loops take up a huge amount of space. It is about a Gig on my computer.

An alternative to all this is just getting a flickr, or photobucket account.

By doing this you’ll be able to delete the photos off your computer and they will all be saved on the server of which ever site you choose to use.

This is what I do when I’m not editing with Aperture. Which BTW Clairedete I have a lot of serials, so just comment me and I can get you Aperture, iWork, and Microsoft office for FREE!

I have a MBP and it really is the best buy I’ve ever made!

And I might have misread your question. Do use iPhoto to import the photos from your camera? If you do you should be OK.

If you have them on your computer and import them to iPhoto it will make copies. To turn that off goto File—>Preferences—>Advanced and disable the first option.

Do you use Chinese? Arabic? Didn’t think so. Best way to free up some space is to junk all the extra language files. See Monolingual

iPhoto keeps the original so, if you botch it while editing, you can revert. Try rotating your images on your camera (if it doesn’t do this automatically) before you dump them on to your laptop. That way, when you won’t be rotating in iPhoto and doubling the size for that photo. I find that’s one of the most common things people do with their photos.

@pualc

Monolingual has a very destructive option set by default. It will strip out PowerPC code rendering some applications unusable on Intel Macs if you don’t disable it first. I had to reinstall Photoshop because I was stupid and not paying attention. That was before CS3 came out.

They should be fine if they only remove the languages. But it is easy to switch over to the Architectures tab and screw everything up.

@johnpowell, that’s good advice, I didn’t know what was a default option. I must have turned it off when I ran it which was some time ago.