Saving and Deleting Photos

Recents isn't a place. Like an album it's a list of images that display together.

In Photos, every photo is in the Library, everything else is a subset of that. That's not going to change. It's the very heart of how the app works.

I would not hold my breath. It would require a complete redesign of how Photos has been designed to be working, and its predecessors, iPhoto and Aperture.

The photo libraries of all of Apple's photo managers have been designed to store each photo only once in the library and the albums are just referencing the one copy in the library. All the predefined albums (Imports, Recents, etc.) are automatically created for us and populated by Photos, based on all photos in the library. To remove a photo from the predefined albums we have to delete it completely from the Photos library. we simply cannot modify the predefined albums without deleting phots everywhere. But we are free to modify any album we create ourselves.

If you are looking for an album where you can distribute your photos from to other albums, create a new album "My Recents" and add all new recently imported photos to this album. Then, whenever you add a photo from "My Recents" to another album, remove it afterwards from "My Recents". It will stay in the other albums you added it to.

No. All photos will always be in your library and in Recents (which is just a different view of the library). If you delete the file, it will delete from your library.