As is the case with iTunes, iPhoto can be both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in the sense that, as software, it does its job quite well at storing and organizing photos on Apple devices, be they portable or not. At the same time, however, it’s a curse because, unbeknownst to most users, it can eat up quite a sizeable amount of resources. What iPhoto does is store photo duplicates into the device of your Mac computers; this means that, every time you edit  photo, be it for cropping, rotation, or any other minor modifications, both its new version and the original photo are stored in the memory of your device.

So, what is there to do in this case? First off, it’s important to understand how iPhoto is clogging your Mac. Then, you can proceed to address the issue, in any one of the two ways described below. Read on to see if you want to address the issue manually, or let CleanMyMac 2 remove iPhoto duplicates for you.

What your iPhoto Library actually contains

All those who rushed to say ‘pictures’, in reply to the above question, are partly in the wrong. Yes, of course your picture library would contain pictures, but it also includes a lot of unnecessary copies of them. Did you know that each time you crop, auto-enhance, rotate, or edit a picture for ‘red eyes’, your Mac will save both versions of the image for you? Aside from storing original file versions, the program also stores .raw file formats, which some cameras store in their internal memories. You may not be aware of the fact that your camera (as some models of cameras do) doesn’t convert your photos into viewable formats automatically. iPhoto steps in and takes care of this, but it also keeps the .raw file in the memory of your computers. Will you ever need that file? Unless you’re a professional photographer, chances are that you won’t. Now, storing photos and other files that you don’t actually need may not be a problem at first, but, in time, it can become a serious nuisance, as it stands to slow down the machine itself.

What can you do to stop the fact that iPhoto is clogging your Mac?

There are two ways to solving this issue. The first one involves downloading, installing, and running an app that identifies unnecessary photos, via an iPhoto scan.

It only takes a couple of minutes to run the scan – afterward, you’ll be presented with a complete list of files which you can safely remove from your computer: all those copies and redundant files will be listed for you to review. Who knows, maybe you decide you actually want to keep some of them, in order to edit them differently than you did the first time around. A CleanMyMac 2 scan comes with a collapsible drop-down menu for each item on the list, which will tell you why a particular file was included on the list of redundancies. These detailed results of the scan should probably be reviewed with care – after that, you can select the files you want to keep by dragging and dropping them into a different place. You can place them on an Ignore List, which will ensure they don’t get labeled redundant on a subsequent library scan. The ‘Clean’ option in the application will then proceed to remove the files which you’ve decided not to keep.

The alternative, manual version to remove unneeded files from your iPhoto Library is to check out the iPhoto Cleanup module and see the files there. You can group the selected files by the modifiers which got them there in the first place (cropped, auto-enhance, ‘red eyes’, etc.). You can choose to remove any files like that, but chances are it would take far longer to go through the process like this, rather than automating it.