A good way to free up hard drive space is to offload photos to an external drive or burn them to DVD (if you don’t have an external drive). Here are methods to delete images from iPhoto for Mac users as well as from Adobe Photoshop Elements for Windows users.
First the Mac. If you want to duplicate the entire iPhoto library, which is a self-contained file on your hard drive, you can create an archived copy by simply dragging the library (it’s located in the Pictures folder) to another hard drive. This preserves all the information in the library, including Faces, Places, albums and slide shows. This duplicate library can be opened on any other Mac that runs iPhoto.
If you want to archive only parts of your iPhoto library, you can burn them to a DVD and then copy the DVD to another hard drive (not the most elegant of solutions, but it works). In iPhoto, select the Events you want to copy, then click the Share menu, then Burn. This iPhoto library on DVD can be viewed on any Mac using iPhoto. This method also saves all the photo metadata and other info from iPhoto. If you don’t copy the DVD to a hard drive, it’s a good idea to burn multiple copies of the DVD, just to be safe.
Finally, if you want to archive photos that can be opened without iPhoto on any computer (I’d choose this option), you can export the images to an external drive. In iPhoto, click the Events you wish to copy, click the File menu, then select Export. Next, you’ll see an Export Photos dialog box. Click Original in the Kind pop-up menu. If you also want to preserve your images with editing applied, choose File, then Export, and then choose JPEG in the Kind pop-up menu and Full Size in the Size pop-up menu in the Export Photos dialog.
After you’re done, you still have to delete the images from the iPhoto library as well as the computer’s hard drive. Identify the images you want to delete, then click Command/Option Delete. You must then empty the iPhoto’s trash, which you’ll find under the iPhoto menu.
Users of Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 8 get 2 gigabytes of free online storage (the Pro version gives you 20 gigabytes). But if you prefer to keep local copies, it’s easy to do it yourself.
A handy feature of Elements is that moving files removes them from the library but leaves a preview file in Elements, which shows the photos but requires you to navigate to the location to which it has been moved to retrieve the full image.
To burn to a CD or DVD, click the File menu, then Copy/Move to Removable Disk. Select Move Files, then Next. The software will ask you to select a destination drive (the default is the CD/DVD burner on your PC). Insert a disc, name the disc, click Done and it writes the photos to the disc.
To copy files to an external hard drive, open the Organizer and select the files or catalogs you want to copy. Select the File menu, then Move. You’ll click Browse in the Move Selected Items dialog box and locate and select the folder into which you want to move the media files. Click O.K. and the transfer begins.
After you move the images, you’ll then need to delete them from Elements and your hard drive. Select the images, click Delete, then click the box that says “Also delete selected item(s) from the hard disk.”
Storing old photos on an external drive or DVDs is a great disk-cleanup exercise. I’ve regained more than 6 gigabytes, and I’m not done yet.
Story: New York Times
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