I have removed photos from albums, now how can I delete the original to reduce size of library. That is automatically delete the original photo from the library if it is not used in any albums.
There is no command to delete photos not in any album.
And there is no reliable way to find photos that are not in any album.
Normally, you can find all photos that are not in any album by creating a smart album:
On the older system version this album has been showing all photos, that are not in any album, and you could delete them there by selecting them there, for example with ⌘A, then use ⌘⌫ to delete them en masse.
But since macOS 10.15 Catalina Photos will consider all photos to be in an album, that have been in an album, if the album has been deleted, without removing the photos from the album. So you may not be able to find all photos this way, that are no longer in an album, but you may find quite a lot of them.
You may want to try, what you can find with this smart album:
There is no command to delete photos not in any album.
And there is no reliable way to find photos that are not in any album.
Normally, you can find all photos that are not in any album by creating a smart album:
On the older system version this album has been showing all photos, that are not in any album, and you could delete them there by selecting them there, for example with ⌘A, then use ⌘⌫ to delete them en masse.
But since macOS 10.15 Catalina Photos will consider all photos to be in an album, that have been in an album, if the album has been deleted, without removing the photos from the album. So you may not be able to find all photos this way, that are no longer in an album, but you may find quite a lot of them.
You may want to try, what you can find with this smart album:
Leonie, thankyou very much for the suggestion, it worked well, there are 14,000 photos that are not in albums and I have deleted 7,000 of them and reducing the photo library size from 63GB to 56 GB. I was expecting a bit more reduction. The exercise also help me to uncover some of the photos that I thought were lost.
Anyway I still got 7,000 more photos to go through, some of them are duplicates. I suppose if I import the same photo twice, it will have 2 copies in the library. Is there a simple method to identify the duplicates?
When you import the same image file twice, Photos will warn you about the duplicate and ask you, if you really want to import the duplicate. If you did not receive a warning, you may have different versions of the same photo, In that case you have to compare the pixel size of the duplicates and the filenames and look at the duplicates, to be sure to keep the best version of the photo. Usually you should make sure to save the unmodified original to preserve the best quality.
Do you perhaps still have an old iPhoto Library in your Pictures folder? If yes, you may want to move it off your system volume to an external volume. Deleting photos from your Photos library may not free much storage, if the same photos are also in an older iPhoto or Aperture library on the same volume.
I have removed photos from albums, now how can I delete the original to reduce size of library
