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ddiokno · Mar 9, 2005, 05:36 PM

Hi there,
was wondering if anyone noticed how much hard drive space the iPod Photo needs for pictures... I bought my wife one for her birthday and when it synced for the first time, it converted the pictures and consumed roughly 7GB for 9000 pictures. I thought that this would be temporary, but it has not changed. Just disappointed because the iPhoto library is already taking up a good bit of space, now having to dedicate that much hard drive space both on the iPod and her Powerbook. Anyway, just thought people might want to know because it was something I wasn't aware of nor is it documented (at least anywhere that I could find). The crazy thing is that if her iPod Photo was synching with my iPhoto library, I'd be in serious trouble, as my library has 20000+ photos... You can check your iPod Photo cache size by opening your iPhoto folder which is in your pictures folder.
regards,
david

Randman · Mar 9, 2005, 09:41 PM

Mine's about 1.3GB with about 1K of photos.

ddiokno · 08:55 PM

What's interesting is that I spoke to Mac Genius and he wasn't aware of the iPod Photo cache, either. He thought that it just made a cache when it optimized the images for the iPod, but that it was temporary (which would make sense, because you already have the pictures in your iPhoto Library if, heaven forbid, something were to happen to your iPod). He also agreed that it made sense that it would be much better if it were a temporary cache and then purged itself after the optimization routine has transferred the photos to the iPod. We tested it and sure enough, after adding pictures to the iPhoto Library and synching, the iPod Photo cache on the computer increased in size. It is not a temporary cache, but a permanent cache. When I deleted the cache, it went through the whole optimization routine again, which is quite a long process for the whole library.
Anyone know how to get rid of the cache without having to resynch the whole library?

I know that my wife's library will grow exponentially with the birth of our second child... :-) and hard drive space is at a premium on her Powerbook (with the current iPod photo cache taking up close to 8Gb...
thanks for any help or clarification,
david

Randman · Mar 12, 2005, 11:09 PM

Get an external HD.

ddiokno · Mar 12, 2005, 11:23 PM

Originally posted by Randman:
Get an external HD.

Yes, but that would negate the benefits of having a Powerbook for the portability... not to mention the waste taking up unneeded hard drive space, since the photos are already in the iPhoto library... so the cache seems redundant (IMHO :-) ) I'm sure Apple has their reasons, but I would think that all that would be necessary is some sort of data base that would keep the iPod and iPhoto in synch...

anyway, just my thoughts... thanks for your advice...
david

mintcake · Aug 9, 2005, 05:32 PM

Originally Posted by Randman

Get an external HD.

Lovely idea, in practice I'm finding that the iPod Photo won't actually sync with an iPhoto library hosted on an external drive. I'm finding this extremely strange. Has anyone successfully synced with an externally hosted iPhoto library?

Oh and fully agree with the original poster, they really could have told us about this permanent 'cache' we now have to live with - 8 gigs in my case! 10% of my drive capacity - and I can't even move it off onto external storage.

Jens Peter · Aug 29, 2006, 10:40 PM

Just kicking this thread alive again - goy myself a replacement for my old 2G 10GB - a new 60GB video... and when doing my backup I noticed how big my iPhoto Library were....

Have any of you found a solution, so you don't need your images twice in the iPhoto folder? (Other than an external drive - I'm also using a powerbook and can't have a external drive with me eveywhere I go...)

skybolt · Aug 30, 2006, 10:38 AM

mintcake -- though it's been a while since I've done it (my husband took over my iPod for his daily podcasts), I got my photos directly from an external quite easily. When I was asked what iPhoto library I wanted to use by the iPod software, I just pointed to the external and it worked like a charm.

indomitable · Sep 18, 2006, 05:03 PM

Does this strike anyone else as an incredibly dumb way to handle putting photos on an iPod? The folder I sync with my iPod is 1.2 gigs. My iPod photo cache is 1.8 gigs. Why am I wasting that HD space on images that are already there? This means to have 1.2 gigs of photos viewable on my iPod I have to use 4.8 gigs of drive space, 2 copies on my HD and one on my iPod. If anyone has suggestions for a way around this clever little system I'd love to hear about it.