Deleted photos not really deleted

Hi,

I have installed a clean copy of El Capitan. I have an iCloud Photo Library working fine between my iPhone and iPad, so after opening OS X Photos all photos were imported OK (well, not Faces, but that's another question). But I have discovered that photos taken with my iPhone and fully deleted from iCloud long time ago are in Masters folder (iCloud Photo Library.photoslibrary > Masters > 2015 > 04 > etc.). How is that possible? Those deleted photos were of course also removed from Recently Deleted Photos album, and they correctly don't appear in Photos app, iPhone or iPad, but they do in Masters folder.

Since I installed a clean copy of El Capitan, those "deleted" photos were downloaded from iCloud Photo Library, where they have supposedly been permanently deleted months ago.

Any thoughts?

Thank you.

MacBook Air, OS X El Capitan (10.11), 13-inch, Mid 2012

Posted on Oct 1, 2015 3:27 PM

19 replies

quantui

Level 1

8 points

Oct 4, 2016 8:13 AM in response to carlos57775

iOS 10 and macOS Sierra still have the same problem...

Dec 4, 2016 10:07 AM in response to carlos57775

I had the same problem. I mostly wanted to delete videos that I had both taken on my iPhone and on a camera and then synced the videos into the Photos app. I opened my Photos app on my Mac and my iPhone, I deleted the videos and photos I didn't want on my macbook and then also did the same on my iPhone. I immediately deleted all from the Recently Deleted folder on my iPhone. Then I closed the Photos app on my macbook, reopened it, saw that the videos and pictures I deleted weren't there, and then I went to Photos>File>Show Recently Deleted, and I deleted everything from there. After I did this, it actually freed up the space (~10gb in my case). I've restarted the Photos app and the computer, and the files are still deleted.

LarryHN

Level 10

106,142 points

May 19, 2017 11:16 AM in response to AppleThree

Of course not - Apple does not generally respond to bug reports - they do look at them and often they are addressed in a future release -

May 19, 2017 12:36 PM in response to LarryHN

Are you talking about the public-facing feedback forms, or the registered developer bug reporting portal? I'm talking about the latter, and I'd say probably ... a third of my reports get feedback.

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Deleted photos not really deleted