caelig
Level 1
(5 points)
Q: Deleting photos in Photos on my Mac and dragging them to external HD
Since I upgraded to Yosemite, I am stuck with Photos, about which I have spent too many hours reading and trying to learn how to delete individual pictures, individual albums to free up space on my HD. I do not want to use iCloud library and read that I can still use iPhoto. After spending a lot of time deleting pictures from iPhoto, I see that they are still in Photos. What a mess! Also, I am unable to drag any photos from Photos onto an external hard drive, or export them to my desktop. I really need help. This is the worst upgrade I have ever had to deal with. My main reason for buying my macbook pro was to deal with the thousands of pictures I take.
markwmsn
Level 5
(5,694 points)
That's quite a knot of interrelated problems you have there. Let's try to deal with some of your annoyances in Photos first.
caelig wrote:
Also, I am unable to drag any photos from Photos onto an external hard drive, or export them to my desktop.
You mention trying to drag items from Photos to an external drive. You should try exporting them to the external drive instead. Once they are there, you can delete the copy that Photos is holding.
You also mention being unable to export from Photos to the desktop. That should work. What happens when you try? Visual error indication? (What indication?) Error message? (What message?) Error tone? (What sort of tone?) Something else? (What?)
After spending a lot of time deleting pictures from iPhoto, I see that they are still in Photos.
If you want to continue using iPhoto, why are you trying to delete photos from its library? Are they bad photos that you never want to use again, do you just take a lot more pictures than you want to keep, are you trying to save space, or is there some other reason?
When you first launched the new Photos application, it created a new Photos library with the contents of the iPhotos library (the main one if you had more than one, or the one you indicated at the time). Photos uses some *nix magic called "hard links" to avoid using double the disk space; this amounts to having the one file seem to be in two places. One side effect of this is that deleting the file from one of these places does not delete it from the other.
The theory is that you'll leave the iPhoto library in place until you get comfortable with Photos, then eventually remove it. In the interim, iPhoto won't interfere with Photo's functioning, nor will Photos change iPhoto's library.
If you are committed to going back to iPhoto, here's a sketch of a plan:
1. Take a backup of your entire disk drive (or at least your user data) to be safe.
2. If there are any photos in Photos that you don't have anywhere else, export them somewhere (that external drive, the desktop, wherever).
3. Delete the new Photos library and empty the trash. This will destroy one of the links to each of the bi-located files, leaving only the iPhoto link; any file previously deleted from iPhoto will now be gone (but you exported a copy elsewhere in step 2).
4. If you exported any photos in step 2, import them into iPhoto.
5. Drag Photos out of the Dock far enough to remove it.
6. Drag iPhoto into the Dock.
Note that I'm assuming you haven't been using iCloud Photo Library. There are probably more steps if you have. Maybe some who has been through it will drop by with more suggestions.
The path to using only Photos is similar (swapping "Photos" and "iPhoto"), except you don't need steps 5 and 6.
