One of the things I didn’t get across in my previous post about “I Don’t Believe IT” was those capital letters. It’s a bit of bad pun – “I don’t believe Information Technology”. Basically, this series is homage to my every increasing “Grumpy Old Man” syndrome about technology. One of the slightly depressing things about being IT is the ludicrious opitimism that abounds the area of technology. It’s like people will think that Technology will always ride into town and save the day. I don’t really see it that way.

Don’t get me wrong I’m internal optimist by prediclition – but what agreeves me is the blind faith people put into technology. It seems people are all too willing to forget that we are monkey’s with monkey brains, and human flaws are often revealed in flawed technology and flawed business processes.

So anyway, this weeks “I Don’t Believe IT” concerns our friend (or enemy) Apple Mac iPhoto. I’m lazy you see and tend to use the default apps that ship with the Mac. Although somewhere between Mountain Lion and Mavericks – iPhoto stopped being free to new uses, and now you have to pay for the darn thing. Here’s the thing – when take a photo in iPhoto and send it to trash – it doesn’t actually delete it.

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I’ve noticed that if you select an “event” in and select File, Reveal in Finder, and Original – you’ll find that the files are still cuffing there!

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Why? WTF. If I send something to the trash, it should be deleted or least be sent to the trash can. I’ve been remiss in trying to work out WHY this happens or how to actually removed these orphaned and unwanted image files (some being anywhere from 1MG-5MB depending on the format used on my iPhone).

Things came to ahead this weekend, when I found my SSD drive was almost full. So I decided to google for iPhoto – as I thought that might be good place to try and free up some precious space. It turns out iPhoto has its own “empty the trash” option – that I’d never heard of before. It’s not suprising as its not in the main File/Edit/Photos menu bar, but under the iPhoto menu itself.

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I wasn’t disappointed. I had 4,500 orphaned files. Emptying the very special iPhoto Trash freed up 5GB of space.

Of course, there will be those who will tell me that iPhoto a PoS, and I should be using something else. Like Windows for instance. But blow me, I assumed that when I delete files they actually deleted. It sound more like the “Trash” is more like a “Remove from Inventory” like you get in the vSphere Client(s), rather than a “Delete from Disk”.