When I replaced my ol good MacBook Pro for MacBook Air, I decided to ditch iPhoto due to its bulky storage system ((It uses ridiculously amount of storage)) for a simple folder based organisation that will be synced using Dropbox ((Off-site backup and it’ll be available on my phone using Carousel too. Anyway, hat tip to Sayzlim for his tutorial on this similar topic.)).

When doing this, I successfully reduced the size of my photo library from 65 GB (This year iPhoto’s library only) into 9.5 GB (All my photos). Here’s how:

  1. Export your photo from iPhoto to particular directory. I named mine: /To Be Dropboxed/Photo/. To do this I just open the library package and copy + paste the photo. No fancy exporter involved as long as I can keep the exif data of the photos.
  2. Move all the videos into another directory ((I moved it into another directory named /To Be Dropboxed/Video/)). I realised that I don’t have time to view all those video, so why bother synced it. Use Automator to automate this process, seriously.
  3. I rarely, even NEVER, print my photos, so why bother having those photos on ridiculously large size? Most of the time, I just enjoyed them on my MacBook / iPhone screen. Hence, I open Automator and resized them all to 2000px width size photo ((My MacBook’s screen width is just 1440px. Even if I used retina desktop one day, 1000px width images aren’t that bad)). That saved ridiculous ((This would be the last “ridiculous” I used on this post. I kinda obsessed with the use of this word on this topic after knowing the space of my storage I can save all this time LOL)) amount of storage.
  4. To save even more storage, I bought JPEGmini and optimise all of my photo size.
  5. Organize my photo into year-month-event-name basis.
  6. Move all of em to Dropbox folder.

Now I have all my photo backup-ed to cloud.