My Photo's library is so big I have created an extra library of one of my hobbies, but I wanted to delete all the other photos and I really don't wanna go through and delete each photo individually because I have around 20,000 photos. I hope there's a shortcut to do this? I am using a late 2015 iMac running Monterey 12.7.6 and Photos 7.0
Thanks
Rob
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
iMac 27″, macOS 12.7
You can delete multiple items from a library using all of the usual multiple-item selection shortcuts to select a batch of items to delete: swipe through them, or click the first then shift-click the last, or the like -- then issue the delete for that group. repeat as needed.
Depending on how you have organized your library and how the items you want to keep are distributed in it, there may be larger swaths of items you can select at a time, like all of the items in a folder or shot at a map location with select-all (but only if you are sure you don't want to keep any of them).
markwmsn,
thank you for your reply. I have all my photos stored under photo albums, and folders with folders and albums inside those folders. I was hoping to find a shortcut to select a folder that contained other folders and delete all of the photos at once. What I'm doing now is merging all the folders that I select into one big album and then selecting and deleting all. It's not exactly how I envisioned it but it seems like it's the fastest way, unless I can figure out a better way! :-).
You can easily select all of the photos in an Album and delete them. I am not aware of a way to select the photos within Albums nested within a Folder.
You may be better off doing it an Album at a time anyway. That way, each delete operates on a smaller numbed of photos and is less likely to run into any hidden resource constraints or bugs.
Is merging the Folders and Albums into larger Albums less tedious?
Do you want to delete each and every photo from the main Photos Library, as you have save the photos you want to keep in a different library?
Then you can just delete the complete Photos Library in the Finder from your Pictures folder and start over with a new, empty library. But this will only work, if you are not using iCloud Photos. To delete the photos from iCloud you have to delete them in Photos.
Robert Garven wrote: … I have all my photos stored under photo albums, and folders with folders and albums inside those folders. I was hoping to find a shortcut to select a folder that contained other folders and delete all of the photos at once.
It's interesting that that's not easy! But you're right-- it's not! If the folders have something in common, maybe they're all from 2023, for instance, then you could use a Smart Album to collect them, and then ⌘-delete them from the Smart Album.
HOLD IT! I think this works-- Open a folder, select all the albums, and use Keyword Manager to add a keyword, maybe "delete," to all of them at once! Then use a Smart Folder to include all pictures with the "delete" keyword! This actually just worked for me!
This may be the first thing I've seen that works with multiple albums! Who knew?
I'm not sure, yet, about folders in folders. Try it and let is know!
Thanks to everyone that responded all with great idea ideas! My problem is I had 90,000 photos in my collection all neatly sorted under around 20 main topics such as family, vacations, band, etc. , and inside each one of these folders was another layer of folders and or albums such as Lake Tahoe, trip, etc.
I have a couple of western digital 4 TB backup drives that I use as an archive. I did not have enough free space on my iMac to do it from there (which would have been preferable) so I duplicated a copy of my photos library which was 600 GB onto one of the drives. After listening to everyone's advice and reading a bunch of other posts, what seems to be working best is selecting a main folder, such as "vacations", selecting all the contents and then selecting "Command N", to create a new album of all the contents combined. I then opened that album selected all and hit delete. The biggest problem is the slow speed connection between the external drive and the iMac I found 30,000 photos that I wanted to delete and it's currently erasing those right now. It has been over 12 hours and still running.
I'm sure you're curious why I'm doing all this so I'll give you a brief description. I play in a band and I have all the band photos and archives. I want them on a separate drive in case something happened to me. Let's say on a tour or a trip and that drive could be given to historian or surviving member of the band without my 60,000 other photos of my vacations, other hobbies and private information shared.
I waited for many years for Apple to come out with a new high power iMac, but they never did so I finally bought a M4 Mac studio and display. I had a problem with the migration with the studio saying it migrated successfully with iMac saying it didn't so that's why I'm trying to save a lot of this information off my old computer to make sure I have it as an archive. The new Mac studio even though I bought a fancy version with an upgraded memory and a terabyte hard drive is in the process of a four day time machine back up, (which apple care says is normal???) but that's another whole story.
Thanks again for everyone's help. I feel like I'm a pretty proficient Apple user but it seems like I'm always asking for help, when I get in trouble and don't have much that I can give in return other than sincere thanks!!!
Rob
How can I mass delete photos from a specific folder or album in Apple Photos?
