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

To be extra sure: when deleting images from photo you should delete them from any albums one has created with them in & also from the 'all photos' folder & doing so will prevent one from re-importing the same images that one has stored on an external hard drive (I have them stored there in standard folders - not in a photo app library) - yes ?

thanks

Not necessary. If you follow step one of my first post:

1 - regardless of where you are in the library, i.e. Moments, Collections, albums, smart albums or projects, select the photo(s) you want to delete and use the key combination of Command+Delete to move the photos to the Recently Deleted smart album.

that will remove the photo from all albums, All Photos and Photos.

sorry, but that is incorrect - removing photos from albums, projects etc does not delete them from 'all photos' or 'photos' as those are both masters & everything else one does with images only places pointers to the masters. As mentioned repeatedly the correct command-delete / delete from recently deleted procedure has been followed but doing so from albums, projects etc does not remove them from 'all photos' or 'photos' - thats clear even in the slightly confusing official apple documentation for the app.

sorry, but that is incorrect - removing photos from albums, projects etc does not delete them from 'all photos' or 'photos'

Sorry but you are wrong and Old Toad is correct as is very well documented and tested - His post is totally accurate

1 - regardless of where you are in the library, i.e. Moments, Collections, albums, smart albums or projects, select the photo(s) you want to delete and use the key combination of Command+Delete to move the photos to the Recently Deleted smart album.

that will remove the photo from all albums, All Photos and Photos.

If you simply read the post and follow the directions it does exactly what it says it does - if it is not working for you then you either have a corrupted library or you are not doing it as directed

To repair a corrupted library backup your Photos library and hold down the option and command keys while launching Photos and repair the database - if you are using iCloud Photo Library this will trigger a new total upload to ICPL

LN

look, I really don't want to offend anyone & I have read the post carefully & hundreds of others & I have followed the correct deletion procedures.

I have repaired the database &, if I had the time, I could send you links to hundreds of websites & forum posts that also state that deleting a photo (with the command-delete / delete from recently deleted process) from an album only deletes the pointer & not the master image itself.

with a fully functioning, non-corrupted photo library I have now deleted every image from the albums section & from the 'recently deleted' folder & every one of them is still in both 'all photos' & 'photos'. I have even spoken to Apple who also confirm that the command-delete process when done on an image in an album does not delete the master or free up any space.

I have no wish to argue any further over this. Clearly, whatever the reason, for lots of users this 'correct' deletion procedure isn't working in el captain.

I deleted all photos, then did a delete all in the Recently Deleted bin, and the library immediately showed as empty.

Then, at first, the Masters directory was still 35 GB large, aaargghh..... but.. after some a few minutes I re-checked and it was only 45 MB large.

Then, at first, the Masters directory was still 35 GB large, aaargghh..... but.. after some a few minutes I re-checked and it was only 45 MB large.

I may have missed something here but that's an increase in size, not a decrease. Was that a typo?

35GB to 45MB -- 35,000,000,000 to 45,000,000 bytes - just a three order of magnitude decrease 😝

LN

DUH! MB instead of GB. Missed that. 😊

I did too for a brief time - sometimes I read too fast and my expectations modifies my reality 😕

LN

I have been wondering about the original question and found this thread. I don't have iPhotos, so this just has to do with Photos on MacOS. Part of what confused me about the postings in this thread was that I didn't see a distinction between the two types of Libraries you can have in Photos. Sorry if you folks know this, but it's an important distinction. In a standard Photos Library you import photos into the Library itself - that's where the photos are stored no matter where you imported them from. That's nice if you want to take advantage of Apple's extensive capabilities to share the photos across your devices. It's not so nice if you have a lot of photos and don't want everything in one huge multi-tens-of-GB database that duplicates the storage of photos that are elsewhere on you hard disk. The other type of Library is called a Referenced Library. (You choose this in the Preferences dialog by unchecking the option to copy photos into the library.) The delete procedure mentioned many times in this thread deletes photos from the Library catalog and, if it's a standard library, from the Library itself. If it's a Referenced Library then deleting just removes the entry from the Library catalog because the actual file is elsewhere. (I've left out the part about the Recently Deleted Album because it's not pertinent to whether the original file is deleted.) In either case, wherever the original photo's file was located, it wasn't deleted. So yes, it's gone from Photos (after being removed from the Recently Deleted Album, of course), but it's isn't gone from your hard disk or your phone or wherever it started out.

If you have a Referenced Library (which is what I use) then the only way I have found to delete the actual file on disk is this:

1. Right click on the photo and select Show Referenced File in Folder. That brings up a Finder window and highlights the file on the hard disk. Keep that window open.

2. Go back to photos and delete the photo (right click and select Remove from Library, for example).

3. Go back to the Finder window and delete the photo's file there.

You probably should delete the photo from the Recently Deleted Album also because the file it points to is gone. I haven't debugged this procedure extensively, but I know it works for single photos. I would be very glad to hear that there is a less cumbersome way to delete photos permanently from both the Photos Library and from the hard disk, at least for Referenced Libraries.

I realized this problem when I use Google Photos Backup to backup my photo library. Photos I deleted permanently from the Recently Deleted album were found by Google Photos Backup, and then I looked into the Masters folder in Photo library, they were all still there in the disk...

In Photos 1.5 recently deleted is an album - look in albums (I find it easiest to show the sidebar - view menu ==> show sidebar)

LN

This isn't good. thanks!

there is not such a line in File

Actually it comes from iphoto archive.