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Storing deleted photos

I deleted 954 photos from my photo app and now would like to store them on an external hard drive just in case I might ever want one of them again. I created a folder on my external hard drive and tried to move the deleted photos from the recently deleted folder by dragging them but without success. Any assistance would be appreciated.

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Mar 28, 2020 7:58 PM

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Posted on Mar 29, 2020 6:40 PM

That would be too painful, since the deleted photos were collected from all over the place. I am using a work-around by emptying my existing favorites into a separate album, making the deleted photos favorites, moving the favorites into my external drive's folder, removing the favorite status from my deleted photos and permanently deleting them and then restoring my favorite photos from the album I created for them. Whew!

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 29, 2020 6:40 PM in response to Rysz

That would be too painful, since the deleted photos were collected from all over the place. I am using a work-around by emptying my existing favorites into a separate album, making the deleted photos favorites, moving the favorites into my external drive's folder, removing the favorite status from my deleted photos and permanently deleting them and then restoring my favorite photos from the album I created for them. Whew!

Mar 28, 2020 10:26 PM in response to sburech

You say you tried dragging "without success." Exactly what happened when you tried?


What version of Photos are you using, and on what macOS level? For example, I'm running Photos Version 5.0 (141.19.150) on macOS Catalina 10.15.4 on my iMac.

As a quick test, I dragged one photo from Recently Deleted to my Desktop, and it worked.

Note that dragging may produce a lower-resolution version of the photo.

Storing deleted photos

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