Tried to delete my Photos library, but a lot of files remain in media.legacy

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Level 1

8 points

Tried to delete my Photos library, but a lot of files remain in media.legacy

I wanted to clear some disk space by migrating photos from my macbook to a hard disk. When I deleted the library I found that a large chunk of files remain.

The path to find these files: Click on Photos in Finder menu; Drop down menu > Show package contents; resources > media.legacy > version

In every subfile of this file are many video's taking up about 64GB. All the files are named something like fullsizeoutput_xxx.mov. My guess is that it's a rendered file when I want to take a quick look at the videos. I also read online that it might be a problem that occurs when I delete my library but the app crashes in the process of deleting.

There are no visible Photos in my library app anymore and I read that deleting this manually might corrupt the library. I am considering doing a clean install.

What are your recommendations? Thank you.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.1

Posted on Jan 13, 2021 1:13 PM

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Answer 1

Jan 13, 2021 2:24 PM in response to meriake

How did you try to delete your library?

Are you wanting to completely remove it.

On the topic of the external drive - have you correctly prepared it for use with a photos library? (Format APFS or MacOS extended (journalled) - and ignore ownership checked?

See

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201517

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Answer 2

Yer_Man

Level 10

166,190 points

Jan 13, 2021 3:48 PM in response to meriake

I want to completely remove my library from my computer.

Then just drag it to the trash and empty it. Next time you run Photos it will create a new, empty library.

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Answer 3

meriake Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 13, 2021 3:07 PM in response to TonyCollinet

I want to completely remove my library from my computer. I don't want to use the library anymore. I just wanted to save the images. What I did was the following:

I had most images I wanted still on my iPhone, so I used ImageCapture to convert the files to JPG format and stored them on my disk. So this has nothing to do with Photos.
I had some Images in HEIC format, those were saved in the Library, so I used the option of the library to export the images and also copied that exported folder to my disk and deleted the folder. I believe this has also nothing to do with Photos when I delete the folder, but I might be wrong here.
Then I simply deleted all the pictures within the Photos app, so I didn't delete anything manually from the folders when you click 'Show Package Content'. It did cause my MacBook pro some time to remove the files, but I don't believe that the program crashed during the process.
When I checked my disk space again, even after removing all pictures and videos, there was still a lot of data left, which I found to be in the files I mentioned in the OC. I don't want to manually remove these files, because I read that this can corrupt Photos.

I believe my hard disk is formatted in ExFat, but I would have to double check again to make sure.

I do not intend to save my photos as a library, I prefer to have the single files in a folder in JPG format.

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Answer 4

Old Toad

Level 10

216,912 points

Jan 13, 2021 2:55 PM in response to meriake

Did you try to detail ALL the photos in your Library? If so it is best to just delete the library itself to get rid of all the overhead files in the library like you found.

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Answer 5

meriake Author

Level 1

8 points

Jan 14, 2021 11:58 AM in response to Old Toad

Thank you!

This solved it. I did delete all the individual pictures, but not the library itself. After deleting it I can create a new empty library when opening the Photos app.

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Tried to delete my Photos library, but a lot of files remain in media.legacy

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