iPhoto library out of control - am I missing something??

Hi everybody,

Everytime I try to free up some space on my hard drive, it always comes down to my iPhoto library, which is 41.1 GB. Now I know I like to take photos, but I was a bit surprised at the size, especially considering that I moved a bunch of old photos to an external hard drive.

So what I noticed is that:
1) There is actually two copies of each photo, an "original" and a "modified".
2) I think there may also be a "previews" copy as well.
3) Photos deleted from the library don't actually get deleted from the hard drive, so I have hundreds of crap worthless photos lost somewhere in there.
4) With iPhoto 09, at least the folders were organized in the same way as the library (by events), which made it relatively easy to move photos to an external drive. I thought that upgrading to iPhoto 11 would improve the first 3 points, but what it did is that now the folders are organized apparently by date - except my photos are all mixed up in a bunch of folders whose names are not indicative of their contents.

Am I missing something? Should I be using Picasa instead to keep my photos organized? I like iPhoto on many levels but it seems the file management is abysmal. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers
Axel

iPhoto is non-destructive. So item 1 is certainly working as designed. Item 2 is as well, as you will need to have a smaller representation of the image for the application to show. Item 3, you need to empty the trash in iPhoto.

I can't answer item 4 as I simply don't use iPhoto, so I have no idea how it changed from 09 to 11.

But if I'm not mistaken, it creates a "modified" copy of ALL photos, even the ones I haven't modified or don't intend to. Seems like a lot of unnecessary used space...

As for #3... der, so I WAS missing something! I can't believe I never right-clicked on it to see if it had an "empty trash" option. Glad I asked, thanks for the (obvious) tip