My "other" file has a 50gb duplicate copy of photos. How do I delete it? Does the latest and greatest system program- Catalina- have no way to make my hard drive useful again? 2020 mac air sys.10.14

Did you read my. previous post about this information from About This Mac? Also, see:

How to Free Up Space on The Hard Drive

1. You can remove data from your Home folder except for the /Home/Library/ folder.
2. Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on freeing up space on your hard drive.
3. Also, see Freeing space on your Mac OS X startup disk.
4. What is 'Other' and 'Purgeable' in About This Mac?
5. Files That Make Up the 'Other' Storage Category, and How to Remove Them
6. Free up storage space on your Mac.
7. See Where did my Disk Space go?.
8. Be sure to Empty the Trash to recover the space.
9. Replace the drive with a larger one. Check out OWC for drives, tutorials, and toolkits.
10. Use OmniDiskSweeper or GrandPerspective to search your drive for large files and where they are located.

Get Correct Storage Information

Do not use the information from the Storage section of the About This Mac dialog. Ignore the Storage information as it is typically wrong. To find out the correct information for any disk: Select a Desktop disk icon. Press Command-I to open the Get Info window and look at the topmost panel displayed. You will find the disk information displayed for Capacity, Available, and Used. If you have more than one disk/partition then repeat for each one on your Desktop.

The categories found in the Storage section of About This Mac is simply an arbitrary way of displaying files on your drive. There are no such categories actually on the drive.

What is 'Other' and 'Purgeable' in About This Mac?

Files That Make Up the 'Other' Storage Category, and How to Remove Them

I don't think you are reading carefully. There is no "Other" category actually on the drive. It's simply an invented category for displaying files. There is no evidence that a duplicate folder exists on the drive. The Documents in the sidebar list is an artificial category in which it is showing your actual Documents and other folders in your Home folder. About This Mac's Storage is smoke and mirrors.

Try looking on the computer via the Finder and forget About This Mac. I've even listed tools you could use.

Have you looked at what is contained in your /Home/Documents folder? The Home folder contains 44GBs. Have you looked to see what is in your /Home/Documents/ folder and the other folders in the Documents folder? I'm not sure what you think is a "ghost file." If you have a large file in your Home folder, I would guess it is the 40gb.photolibrary which is, roughly, 38GBs. That file should be found in the /Home/Pictures/ folder.

So, did you open the /Home/Pictures/ folder to see if the photoslibrary file was inside? That's where it usually would be stored. If it isn't there, then look inside the /Home/Documents/ folder. If you want to make it simpler, then try doing a Spotlight search of your Home folder. Open a Finder window, select your startup drive from the sidebar, open the Users folder and select your Home folder. In the Finder's Search field enter "40gb.photoslibrary" as the search term (without the quotes.) If it's found, then it should be displayed in the search results window.

Quit Photos. Move the duplicate file you want to delete to the trash. Empty the trash. Then, if the free space does not show up immediately, you can wait or restart your computer.