Monitoring and Optimizing your iPhoto folder size

I noticed recently that my hard drive had shrunk by several, if not a dozen GB. The phenomenon shortly followed a smooth upgrade to OSX Lion who became suspect #1 shortly. And in vain.

Then I turned towards the other usual suspects, namely caches. For these, a simple restart does most of the cleanup and reclaims several GB if your machine has been up and running for a long while (several days if not weeks).

Focus really came to iPhoto when I realized that some changes made to pictures within iPhoto did not reflect on my iPad2: pics were preserved, but did not show up in their latest version.

So I opened the iPhoto packet (Ctrl-click) in my Images folder, sorted content by size, and found that the iPod Photo Cache was 19.6 GB = 25% of my total iPhoto library size

This folder holds all the resized versions of pictures you sync with your various iDevices: in my case, many of the iPhones I had used in my former business lives along with two iPads and a now old iPod Photo… Even if it sits in the iPhoto packet, the iPod Photo Cache content is actually manipulated by iTunes at each synchronization session.

Capture_decran_2011-08-30_a_14

So I quit iPhoto, trashed the folder, and went for 2 long sync sessions (iPhone and iPad) as the whole cache had to be regenerated. Now my pics are in sync again, and the new cache folder is 85% smaller.

Tell me about yours.

[SOLVED]??Strange iPhone/iPad glitch : how to « see » again a « lost » WiFi network

Shortly after iOS4.3 update, I noticed that my iPhone 4 did not « see » my Home Network anymore. The situation was quite unusual as

  • all other devices home, including other iDevices and laptops could still « see » this network
  • my iPhone 4 could see other networks and connect to them
  • restarting the TimeCapsule and Airport stations did not change anything, neither did an iPhone shutdown followed by a start
  • resetting the network parameters did not change anything beyond wiping all my memorized networks

I could not find any trace of this on the web, not even on Quora and before calling Orange customer service, I did a last try on facebook and got a very interesting answer from Bruno Innecco : it turns out that this problem could be solved by resetting the iPhone instead of restarting it. You tend to think that the iPhone reset (reboot) procedure is relevant only in the case of a frozen machine, yet in the present case I could get my (home) WiFi network back.