iPhoto Library Manager

If you're a Mac user, you likely take a lot of photos and rely heavily on iPhoto. iPhoto is a great tool for managing and editing your digital photos. However, as more and more of us are taking more and more photos, we are quickly discovering there are some issues over time. For example, I take around 5,000 photos a year. Yes, I like to take a lot of photos. I do my best to keep them all organized using iPhoto events, keywords and smart albums. However, my iPhoto library eventually began to take over my hard drive. I had a 38 GB iPhoto library and there was no end in sight. So I had a couple of options:

1. delete a bunch of photos
2. back up a bunch of photos to DVDs
3. take fewer photos
4. look for a way to split my iPhoto library into multiple libraries

Options 1 and 3 were not really options. Option 2 would work, but then my albums, keywords, and organization is lost. Option 4 looked like the best alternative. So to the Web I went. As it turns out, I'm not alone and there were a number of possible solutions. After some reading about and trying some applications, I started using iPhoto Library Manager from Fat Cat Software.

iPhoto Library Manager allowed me to split my current iPhoto library into multiple smaller libraries. Of course, this still didn't solve my hard drive space issue. I needed a plan. So after some thought, I came up with a plan of how I wanted to organize my photos. At the beginning of each year, I create a new library for that year and move the library from 2 years ago to external drives. I also maintain a library of my favorite photos. I now have 3 iPhoto libraries on my hard drive:

• the current year
• the previous year
• my favorite photos

All previous years are backed up on 2 different external drives. If I need them, I can get to them pretty easily. There was some logic to my plan. I figured, there is a really good chance I'm going to want to see a photo I took the previous year, but a two-year-old photo that was not a favorite photo would be a stretch. Since I take so many photos each year, this system has worked out really well. I'm sure if you took a second and looked at your needs, you could come up with a solution too.

So why not just use iPhoto and change the library in the preferences? Simple, iPhoto Library Manager does some other things that make it completely indispensable. It not only manages all the different libraries, it also lets me move/copy albums or photos between libraries, merge libraries, split libraries and more. The application just streamlines the who process in a nice simple interface that keeps all my metadata (iPhoto keywords, edits, etc.) in place as I move photos.

Fat Cat Software offers another application the does basically the same thing for iTunes. It's a really handy application for splitting up your iTunes library. If you have a lot of iTunes content, you might want to check out PowerTunes from Fat Cat Software as well.