How to PERMANENTLY delete a photo from iPhoto?

Hmmmm, after reading quickly through this thread, my impression is that you have not used iPhoto as you should (see first posts by Devlin) and that you even misused CleanMyMac2 (see your responses to Leonie) since you seem to still have (some of) the original masters, lucky for you.

As you can find in this forum, CMM is really the worst of the available (scam) cleaning apps. While some years ago it was generally thought that MacKeeper was the worst, but now it seems CMM is even worse.

I politely propose to uninstall CMM quickly, in order to avoid the situation that you may use it to cause further damage.

have a good day,

Lex

Léonie, I created a backup of the iPhoto library before I ran CleanMyMac. I have two libraries now: before and after modification. Some files were not affected by the cleaning as they didn't have duplicates (I left them unchanged). If "CleanMyMac2 deletes the original from the Masters folder and replaces them by the preview of the edited version" then the files should differ in both libraries. I checked them, they remain same in both versions within the corresponding Masters folders. I assume, cleaning procedure didn't affect the original files.

Thank you for help!

Good to hear, you have been cautious.

After reading your reply, I downloaded the CleanMyMac 2 trial again, and it is still deleting Master files, as my test shows. But it is no longer doing it automatically, you have to go to the Detail view and manually select the photos, where you want the "hidden service copies" removed. "Hidden Service copies" is the term that CleanMyMac2 is using for the original image files.By default it is keeping the edited version.

After clicking "remove" for the "Hidden Service Copy" by Masters folder is showing this - the rotated version is the new Master file:

And the second copy of the same image is now using the rotated file as well as Master.