37,000 items were added to MACs Photo app. No idea where they came from and are knobs buttons keyboards foreign and English. Just a mess. This was added to 24,000 pictures already in photo. Can this mistake be undone.? Volume has slowed photos to hours so normal actions aren’t helpful.
The only way to easily undo this is:
1 - Delete them from the "imports" folder.
Or if that is not working
2 - Restore the library from a backup taken before the import.
This can happen, if you import some cache from an application into Photos, for example, if you use a search in the Finder to find all images. Such a search can collect really all image files, also the cached buttons and icons from inside applications.
As Tony wrote, you should find the last import in the "Imports" album. If the photos have been synced from other devices with iCloud, they should appear in the Recents album.
Here’s the rest of the story which I originally didn’t think applicable. The garbage file was something I accidentally download many years ago and didn’t use and apparently didn’t delete. So out off site out of mind. I recently got Google photos to store my excessive volume of photos while I sorted them. Google photos kept copying from Photos but every time it would get close to finishing it added numbers to the pending number to be saved. So it kept adding to the number of pictures I had started with. Two days ago Apple photo suddenly added about 13,000 “photos” that I didn’t take into my Photo app.
What think happened was that because google photos was not told to copy only my Apple Photo file it copied those photos then “looked” for more photos to copy and found this old download and started copying those “photos” into Google photos AND put them into Apple Photo as well. They were sandwiched into 2017 dates which when I download this garbage.. I don’t know for certain this happened, I am only reasonably suspicious it did. So I’ve deleted Google photos and am deleting the icons and whatever from photos on my phone one by one. Tedious to say the least.
This usually happens to me when I import photos from an android. This may occur if you have connected an android and/or a similar device, and have the options to automatically import selected the last time you connected the device. Is my best guess.
Thanks for all the responses
Faulty import to photos won’t delete
