Managing Photos - Deleting batch

Question

Managing Photos - Deleting batch

After years of taking photos my wife and I finally decided to start culling. We got Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro but quickly found that while it deletes duplicate photos from albums, it doesn't seem to delete them from our Macs. Maybe because we had iCloud selected to sync photos?

Anyway, we're left with two photo collections on our Macs with ~ 15,000 photos each. A few thousand are duplicates, but probably half or more are photos we really don't want to keep.

Is there a way to batch delete the completely from our collections using software so we don't have to delete them one by one? Of course, we'll still have the chore of looking at all of them, but batch deleting would make it a much easier job.

Thanks.

MacBook Pro 13”, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jan 31, 2020 4:36 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Joseph_S.

Community Specialist

Feb 3, 2020 2:35 PM in response to Wascally Wabbit

Hello Wascally Wabbit,

Thank you for posting in the Apple Support Communities. I understand you would like to know how to delete multiple photos from your Mac.

You are able to delete multiple photos at once, using the Photos app.

“Delete multiple photos

Press and hold the Command key.
Select the photos that you want to delete.
Press the Delete key.
Confirm that you want to delete the photos.

When you delete a photo, it goes into your Recently Deleted album, where it stays for 30 days. If you use iCloud Photos, the photos that you delete are moved into the Recently Deleted album on your other devices too. After 30 days, Photos deletes the photos permanently. You can permanently delete photos right away when you click Delete All in the Recently Deleted album.

When you delete photos directly from an album by pressing the Delete key, you only remove them from the album and not your entire photo collection. If you want to delete photos from both the album and your collection, press Command-Delete.”

You can find this and additional information linked below.