How to delete pictures permanently from Photos app in my entire mac?

Wow.

I responded to the post below and it dropped it here at the end of the string... so much for context:

As far a treadjacking goes... ah NO. I'm not. This thread is clearly about not gaining disk space when deleting items from Photos and iPhoto.

I didn't realize the "reply" button on a message on this site doesn't actually reply to that message at all it just adds it to the end of the string. Now that I realize that, please find my full message with the proper context below. ( And just to be clear I did not do something wrong per the instructions provided below).

To delete photos from the Photos app in OS X, do the following:

-Open the Photos application and select the photo(s) you wish to delete in the All Photos section.

-Press command+delete on your keyboard to delete the photos.

-Next, in the menu bar at the top of your screen, click File > Show Recently Deleted.

-Find and select the photo(s) that you just deleted.

-Click the "Delete # Items" button, at the top right corner of the Photos applications.

-You will see a message warning you that you are about to permanently delete the selected photos and this action cannot be undone. Click OK.

Your photo(s) will now be removed from the "Masters" folder in your "Photo Library" and deleted from you hard drive forever.

DPL19702 Aug 26, 2015 12:39 PM
Re: How to delete pictures permanently from Photos app in my entire mac? in response to sbunns

Did exactly as instructed here.

Deleted over 1000 pictures and 50 large movie files.

And actually lost available space on my hard drive.

So confused as to why this is so difficult.

Again it would be much smarter to start a new thread since this is so convoluted and impossible to follow - but you do what you want - you are much more likely to resolve this with a coherent thread to post in

Following those instructions will not increase disk usage - depending on undisclosed information it might leave it the same

Do you have a referenced or managed library? Do you still have an iPhoto library that they were migrated from on disk? If so you need to delete from there too - or if you are positive that you are finished with iphoto trash the iPhoto library

LN

Reindex your hard drive according to this Apple document: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support

Old Toad,

How long does re-indexing take? I ask bc followed those directions as well earlier but I can't tell if the mac is doing anything and nothing has changed with available space yet. Seems like something that would take some time to complete.

Thanks

Dan

It can take up to an hour depending on how big the drive is and how many files are on it. Open Activity Monitor and check the CPU section to see how much mdworker is running.

What does Re-indexing the hard drive actually do please?

It lets Spotlight go thru all of the file on the hard drive and index the file names and contents so you can search for any work or phrase in a document on the drive or by file name, etc. It also re reads the file sizes.

The Spotligh index is what lets you quickly find all files with a certain phrase or work in them, .........

Thanks.

Sounds similar to the search function in iPhoto which allows you to quickly search for images with certain info..

Ok, i have this problem too. I didn't import anything from iPhotos. I started fresh. I installed Photos and turned on iCloud Photo Library.

iTJMacattack wrote:

Now here's the thing, i tried all the steps mentioned above like, show recently deleted and deleted from there permanently. But when i go to the masters folder, all the photos are still there. Because i have enable iCloud photo library, i delete photos from my iPhone too. It gets removed from the photos app on mac, but still are available there in masters folder.

I am using MacBook Pro Yosemite

and iPhone 5s iOS 8.4.3

Please help!

Did the same thing, but still photos aren't deleted from masters folder. My iCloud Photo library is also switched on.

Thank you! Going to recently deleted in Photo app and then deleting all from there worked. Freed up hard drive space within a minute of deleting all.

Nice stuns, that was a simple and effective solution. I did as you said and cleared out 7GB quickly and easily

sbunns not stuns...gotta love auto correct

Have the same issue.

Is there any option to REAL erasing photos from Photos (and then from my Mac)?

Cheers

Thanks. This helps enormously. I used iphotos for pre-processing large numbers of RAW files before exporting as jpegs. Most days, a couple of hundred or more 23mb RAW images are imported into photos out of which I select ten or so for onward processing. Having up to 4gb of unused deleted pictures a day for thirty days was completely messing up my system. Not to mention that the back-up disk I use for Time Machine is getting full after ten days of back-ups. It seems that over the last few years Apple the requirements of Apple's original customer base of print processors are being dumped in favour of making their machines Twitter friendly.