I need a bigger hard drive, Part 2

Whew! When we left off last time, I had just reinstalled both OS 10.3, followed by OS 10.5 on my 5 year old iMac - you know, the kind with the pixar-desk lamp-like body? (Why did they abandon that body type so soon, anyway? It was so cool! And I liked the mobility of that screen.)

That whole exercise left me with almost no space on my hard drive, so I was shuffling around deleting unused apps. I mean, who needs World Book 2004 in the days of Wikipedia? And I never use Virtual PC anymore now that I have my Intel MBP with Parallels running Windows XP. That opened about 6GB. Then I started the iPhoto library import from Previous Systems (which I mentioned in the last post). As more and more photos were imported, the GB remaining got lower, and lower, and then approached zero - so this whole time I'm scanning for other big files and apps I can get rid of. I learned more about the files on this machine than I've known since I last used it regularly in March 2007. Here's what I learned...

Somehow, I ended up with doubles of almost every picture taken in my iPhoto library. One would be the typical 1mb file size, the other was appx 19KB. I'm guessing that this has to do with the way I imported my iPhoto library. Not knowing truly how to do this (and not being able to find anything about how to recover a library in iPhoto 6 help) I just selected "iPhoto library" from the Pictures folder in my old User directory. I'm guessing this imported ALL of the little thumbnails as separate pictures? Anyway, I've spent at least an hour so far deleting these one by one, and am only about 1/3 done.

I also found out that I have duplicates of almost every photo taken prior to 2004, because when I changed to iPhoto from the software that came with my Canon camera, I never deleted the original Canon files. That's good, at least, because it buys me some more space on my hard drive now that I know I can delete those...

So today, the fun continues cleaning up that old 12/2003 machine, while I'm still down to 2 GB on the MBP. All this because I'm a notoriously bad filer, even in analog mode, so it's no wonder my computers are as cluttered as my office! But that's a story for another day.