When you import movies into iMovie 10 libraries, the file is always copied, wasting space and hindering editability. This script replaces the copy with a hardlink, reclaiming disk space.

dedup-imovie-library

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# Usage: dedup-imovie-library LIBRARY ORIGINALS
#
# Goes through an iMovie 10 library and replaces all the "Original Media" with
# hardlinks to the actual original media, in order to conserve disk space. Note
# that because they're hardlinks, if you copy the originals and the iMovie event
# to a new disk, you'll end up with two copies again and will have to re-run this
# tool.
#
# This assumes you've already imported the files into iMovie and waited for them
# all to be copied.
#
# This also assumes movie files in LIBRARY have unique matches in ORIGINALS with
# the same filename!

require 'fileutils'

library = ARGV.shift
originals = ARGV.shift

fail "Library #{library} does not exist" unless library && File.exist?(library)
fail "Originals folder #{originals} does not exist" unless originals && File.exist?(originals)

# For each original file in the imovie library
Dir.glob(File.join(library, '**', 'Original Media', '*')) do |library_file|
  next unless File.file? library_file

  # Skip it if we've already replaced it with a hardlink
  next if File.stat(library_file).nlink > 1

  original = Dir.glob(File.join(originals, '**', File.basename(library_file))).first

  next unless original

  puts "Linking #{library_file} => #{original}"
  FileUtils.rm_f library_file, verbose: true
  FileUtils.ln original, library_file, verbose: true
end

This is a great looking concept, but I am struggling to get it to work for me.

Based on your post about this script:
http://benhollis.net/blog/2014/06/28/hard-linking-videos-to-save-space-in-your-imovie-library/
I got the impression the script should be saved to the ~/Movies directory. I saved the script as "dedup-imovie-library" with no file extension using TextEdit.

When I run the terminal command however, I get the following message:
-bash: dedup-imovie-library: command not found

Can you please help me to understand where I'm going wrong here?

Thanks so much for offering a great script to fix yet another one of Apple's poorly designed architectures.

You have to run ./dedup-imovie-library.

Hi,

I had the same problem above but fixed it by using chmod 777 dedup-imovie-library then using it as suggested, ./dedup-imovie-library.

I have a folder with all my GoPro files imported by GoPro Studio Importer, this puts them into subfolders within the GoPro folder.

My question is, can I use this code to scan through all the subfolders? If not is there an easy change to the code to allow this. Sorry, I don't know Ruby at all.

Thanks,

Stu.

Thanks for the code, I'm very happy to use it.

I made 3 modifications:

1. Replace the last line's command from "FileUtils.ln" to "FileUtils.ln_s" so it becomes a symlink(=softlink), which is working very well, also on other drives (not only which the iMovie library is on)

2. To not to replace symlinks, change the line
   next if File.stat(library_file).nlink > 1
   to
   next if File.stat(library_file).nlink > 1 || File.lstat(library_file).symlink?

   or if you don't want audio files to be processed too:
   next if File.stat(library_file).nlink > 1 || File.lstat(library_file).symlink? || File.extname(library_file) == ".wav" || File.extname(library_file) == ".mp3" || File.extname(library_file) == ".m4a"

3. Add "File::FNM_CASEFOLD" to the original file search command, so it searches case insensitive. (My original files are .MTS and iMovies modifies them during copy to lower case (.mts). So that's the modified command:
   original = Dir.glob(File.join(originals, '**', File.basename(library_file)), File::FNM_CASEFOLD).first

Great script! I'm a fairly new Mac user and was blown away when I discovered that iMovie copies files into its library. I'm currently on a one year trip and hard disk space is at an absolute premium. With tons of GoPro footage sitting duplicated on my drive, I was not a happy camper. I wanted to add a safety feature to the script though. You can check it out here:

https://gist.github.com/aardvarkk/9206a4eb5d5e78e5dbc0#file-dedup-imovie-library

All I did was add a check that the file contents are the same. This way, you won't accidentally delete/link a file that happens to have the same name as another. It will slow the entire process down, obviously, so maybe you'd want to add a switch or something... but for me I'd rather it be as safe as possible and I don't mind the hit to the speed.

Great work on this script. A tip of the hat to you, and a wag of the finger to Apple for wasting half of my hard disk with duplicated videos!

Thanks for this! I noticed that iMovie saves its files as .mp4 whereas my GoPro saves them as .MP4 and the comparison was failing because of the mis-matched case. I updated this gist (after incorporating @kabadisha's fork)

https://gist.github.com/swrobel/1fa71ea870a4d0feac2a6ca93b5e36eb