I finally got around to upgrading my Mac to Yosemite this past weekend. With the upgrade, Aperture stopped working and since Apple since stopped supporting it and pulled it from the App Store (jerks), I was stuck converting my library over to the new Photos app.

The actual conversion was fairly smooth. My photos all imported, and the old library was renamed "Aperture Library.migrated" or something like it on disk. That's where it got a bit confusing for me. See, I don't have that large of a library (130G or so), but it's larger than it really needs to be. Anyone who shoots in raw can likely relate. Each image at 20M+ - with a really low-end and outdated DSLR - can add up quickly, especially when you don't cleanup things like 30 blurry shots of that bear we encountered at Sequoia National Park a few years ago.

I have been wanting to cleanup my library for quite some time and decided that since I'd be learning this new Photos app, now seemed like a great time to do some cleaning. Since I wanted to know how much impact my cleanup efforts had actually made (what engineer doesn't measure before they start?), I did my usual thing when checking out disk space used. I hopped over to iTerm, cd'd to my Pictures directory, and started poking around. Turned out, du was showing ~130G for my Aperture library, but something like 6G for Photos. This was sort of weird to me since I thought my library had been "migrated" and now I didn't know what to do with that old Aperture library.

I sort of ignored this situation at first and started cleaning out photos (since I did know roughly where I had started). However, all of my efforts to clean out photos (I calculated that it should've been at least 10G at some point) had only produced more disk space usage than when I started. This was due to Photos generating thumbnails, which I assumed would happen, but no positive progress was made on the Masters part of the library. I read a few forum threads about older versions of Aperture not deleting originals, and was dreading the mess that I was likely going to have to clean up.

After exploring for a bit more (okay, like an hour), I discovered that du showed the Photos library was ~120G when I ran du directly against it, rather than using "*" in the Pictures directory. Clever. Photos was using hardlinks to maintain the same file structure for the "Masters" directory, but not duplicate space usage after the migration of the library. After quickly experimenting and confirming that the inodes were indeed the same between the two libraries for a few random masters, I realized the only thing left to do was delete the old Aperture library to get rid of the references to the deleted files (after safely archiving it to an additional external drive, of course).

Except for one more problem. It turned out that Time Machine will create a local backup copy of files (not cleverly using hardlinks!) while you delete them, until they can be transfered safely to your backup volume. This is great, except that I didn't have an extra 130G on my disk at the time to store them. There's also apparently no safety mechanism for Time Machine to detect this exact situation. Fortunately, I caught on around the 94% mark while it was emptying my trash. Cancelling the trash emptying (took a long time and) made some of the temporary files disappear, but not all. I was still stuck around 90%.

Looking at the storage data in the "About This Mac" window, it clearly showed that a lot of storage was still being used by "Backups". Since I had actually planned on switching Time Machine volumes, a quick sudo tmutil disablelocal cleared out that storage. Since this is normally a useful feature, I also turned it back on right away with sudo tmutil enablelocal.

Good times. I'm pretty late on this one, but hopefully I can help someone else avoid the same pains I went through!