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My library is getting too large. I'd like to remove the videos so I can manage them separately. I suppose if there was a way to sort the library by media type, then I could drag all the videos to a folder then delete them.

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2 Answers

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Create a smart album inside iPhoto with multiple criteria (iPhoto unfortunately can't create smart albums based on Kind).

Filename ends with .mov
Filename ends with .avi

Etc.

Then flag them all with a unique keyword (e.g., DELETE). Go to Photos under Library and search for that keyword.

Throw away everything you find.

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I'm worried that deleting library content from the finder will leave orphaned metadata in the iPhoto library, possibly causing problems. – rob Jun 28 '11 at 14:50
I meant a smart album inside of iPhoto. I've updated my answer to be more clear. – bahamat Jul 5 '11 at 6:34
That worked great! Thank you. – rob Jul 5 '11 at 21:22
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I think you can do this in Finder. If you open a finder window, you may be able to use the built-in search functions in there.

For example, you should see a list of a few folders on the nav bar on the left that are kind of purple in color - those are saved searches and I believe they'll show you content from within iPhoto. There's also the built-in spotlight search box in the upper right-hand corner of your finder window (and another master one for the system in the top right). That may help you.

I'm pretty sure spotlight has everything it needs to give you search results for exactly this very quickly. Of course, this depends on you having something like OSX 10.4 or whenever spotlight was released. It is cool that it'll show stuff from within iPhoto. At least, it does for me on Snow Leopard.

Anyway, I can't test as I don't have a mac handy. Good luck

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Doing this from the Finder is a bad idea, because iPhoto's index will be out of sync with the filesystem. – bahamat Jun 27 '11 at 22:52
@bahamat - What he if hasn't changed iPhoto in a long time? At some point they must be reasonably in sync. What would you suggest? – Doc Jun 27 '11 at 22:55
If you just delete files from the filesystem then iPhoto will think the files are still there because it maintains a master database of content. – bahamat Jun 27 '11 at 23:01
@bahamat - and it doesn't gracefully deal with missing files?? Man, that's not cool. – Doc Jun 27 '11 at 23:31
white phoenix: there's no automatic cleanup, no. But if you later happen upon one of the missing files it will ask if you want to remove it from the index. – bahamat Jun 27 '11 at 23:33
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