Imovie - project deletion

What steps are you taking to delete the projects? The procedure is to go to the projects browser screen (where your projects are displayed as icons) and move your cursor over the icon of the project that you wish to delete. That will cause a little circle with dots in it to appear to the right of the project's title. Click on the circle and choose Delete Project from the pop up menu. However, simply deleting the project will not remove the media from the the iMovie library. To do that you must next delete the Event in the sidebar that bears the project's name. You must delete the event itself, not just the clips that are contained in the Event.

Your Mac shouldn't be slowing down because of the number of projects unless your iMovie library is very large (in which case iMovie might slow a bit) , or you have insufficient free space on your internal drive for iMovie to function correctly. So check your free space and relocate to another dirve, or delete, any data that that you can.

Be aware that the iMovie projects in the iMovie app itself contain very little content. The clips that you are working with are small sized thumbnails that refer to the large sized originals that are contained in the iMovie library. If you are having space problems you can store your iMovie library on an external drive that is formatted APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Reformatting will erase all data on the external drive, so first back up any data that you want to keep.

Here's another thought: Create a new back up library and move the project there and see if you can delete it from there. You could even delete the whole new library containing the project if you wanted. See Working with Multiple Libraries in the help menu for instructions. If this works it might not cure the underlying glitch, but at least it will get rid of the project.

Good luck with this.

--Rich

When you say that a project "will not go away", do you mean that it is still displaying in the project browser screen of the iMovie app even after you have deleted it?

If you control click on the Library's icon in the Movie folder and then click on Show Package Contents, is the project shown in the Show Package Contents folder? (Don't move, alter, or delete anything that is in the Show Package Contents folder.

Did you try my suggestion of creating a new library, moving the project to it, and deleting the project from the new library?

Another thing that you can try is deleting/resetting preferences. To delete/reset preferences, open iMovie while

holding down the Option and Command keys and select to delete preferences in the box that appears. iMovie usually will open in a new empty library. If so, reopen your old library to get back to your projects. Possibly you may need to reboot to set the changes.  Now see if you can delete the stubborn projects that won't delete. Deleting preferences is a safe procedure that will not cause data loss or disruption to your project.

-- Rich

I delete projects and all files for them after I upload them to my ssd drive. Last week, for the first time ever one of the projects will not go away. All of the files are gone but the project is still there. I've "deleted" it more than 3 times and it never goes away.