I deleted approximately one-third of my images from my Photos Library (yes, I went to "Recently Deleted" and clicked on "Delete All") but its 45GB size did not shrink appreciably at all.
Is there a hidden method or even third party utility that can free up and compact the Photos library?
MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1), 2.9 i7
Is your Photos Library an iCloud Photo Library with optimize Storage enabled?
In that case you do not have much control over the storage used.
Just to be sure - if you deleted photos from albums, did you delete using "remove from album" or "delete ... photos"?
The delete key will only remove from the album --pressing command-delete will delete from the library.
And if your Photos Library is a migrated iPhoto Library or an Aperture Library, the storage will only be released, if you delete the photos from both libraries, because the photos in both libraries are linked by hard links.
No, not on iCloud.
Yes, deleted them from Photos/All Photos, and not from the albums (which I deleted all the empty ones too).
No, I don't have any iPhotos library remaining as those have been all deleted, though it was originally from an iPhotos conversion long, long ago (Yosemite, I believe?) when it was only 2.5GB (the Photos Library is now at 45GB); FYI, all photos from the iPhotos library are still accessible after deleting the outdated iPhotos library.
Could it be, that the photos in your Photos Library have been imported as referenced? In that case the originals are not stored inside the library and deleting photos will not decrease the library size.
No, they should all be physically inside the Photos Library "package" as I've always set the preferences to "Copy" items to the library, be it Photos or iTunes, so I know exactly where everything is at in one location, and can delete the originals as needed. The fact that the size has now ballooned to over 45GB over the intervening years bears that out (links shouldn't add such a significant amount of real estate, as that's one of the original intent of links to begin with, to conserve space).
Besides, the vast majority of images are from my iPhone and digital camera, and I always delete them from those devices to conserve the limited free space on them.
Deleting one third of the photos should have deleted one third of the size.
If you are syncing with iTunes, your Photos Library may contain a very large iPod Photo Cache, however.
Have you checked the size of this cache? See: iTunes: Understanding the iPod Photo Cache folder
This little nugget revealed a 6.16GB cache folder, which I promptly deleted. This comprised about 14% of the total 45GB size, but many of the photos I deleted were images I acquired elsewhere, so were typically 72dpi resolution and smaller pixel sizes.
Still, there should be more reduction savings, and this cache will be rebuilt from remaining photos so the true savings thus far is yet undetermined.
Have you tried to repair the Photos library?
That can collect photos that are orpaned in the Photos library and no longer accessibe.
See this Help page: https://help.apple.com/photos/mac/1.0/?lang=en#/pht6be18f93
MAke sure, you have a current backup of your library, before you repair it. Normally it is perfectly save, but if a library hs problems, repairing can make it worse.
No savings realized whatsoever after repairing.
Repairing will collect orphaned photos in a folder or album with "Recovered" in the name. Is there any new album with photos that should already have been deleted?
None, either within the Photos app, within the Photos Library package, nor within the folder where the Photos Library is located.
And I went through all the images and there were no "deleted" images reappearing...
I think the "repair" processing somehow corrupted some of the images, since a few of them have been rotated and when I go to rotate them back, it crashes Photos; every photo that I attempt to rotate for wrong orientation crashes Photos.
In addition, the "ordering" of some of the photos that are normally grouped by date taken are now sorted within different groups of photos taken at a different time.
In addition, the "ordering" of some of the photos that are normally grouped by date taken are now sorted within different groups of photos taken at a different time.
Then Photos has recovered added back older original master files, that have been buried in the library and were not accessible for deletion. It is weird, that these are not contained in a folder with albums of recovered files.
I think the "repair" processing somehow corrupted some of the images, since a few of them have been rotated and when I go to rotate them back, it crashes Photos; every photo that I attempt to rotate for wrong orientation crashes Photos.
That can be orphaned image version, no longer connected to the original photo. Look at the Info panel for these photos and search for other copies with the same file name.
I think the problematic items you are now seeing are the files that should have been removed when you emptied the "recently deleted" album, but they have been left in the library.
When you are sure, that there are healthy copies of the problematic photos, try again to delete the corrupted versions. It should work better after the library has been repaired.
Well, all I know is that the images that were affected were not part of my original mass purge (deletion).
I've since restored an unmodified Photos Library, complete with all the images that I wanted deleted. So I will have to start over in weeding out the chaff.
I haven't started that process yet, but was contemplating doing a forced Repair to see if I get the same problems. Yea, I think I'll do that first before anything...
The repair on the newly restored original Photos Library yielded vastly different results.
There were lots of new "empty" images added.
A few images were incorrectly "located" using position data from other images; can't seem to delete the erroneous locations, nor am I able to see or copy the correct location from images taken in the same place (even though Photos clearly shows where they were taken in their group headlines).
I did lose some images, and others had their thumbnails replaced with unrelated, usually distorted thumbnails of other photos.
It appears that almost all of the issues affected more recent dates (past 6 months), though the thumbnail issue occurred with one of my oldest images.
I'm viewing the source Photos Library that I copied to my Mac Pro to use as a comparison to the "repaired" Photos Library on my MacBook Pro.
I did notice that I've lost all "Live Photos" (those that have short videos included with the "static" image) and videos taken with my iPhone, even when I open the original source Photos Library on the original computer that it was maintained on. These were recent images from the new iPhone 6S I got in January, so it's not a terrible nor huge amount of lost memories.
The thing is, I'm not sure of the significance of these issues: was it truly corrupted images and/or database? Or is this indicative of systemic problems with the Photos app itself? Or is it with file system corruption, or the hard drive itself (SMART checks out clean bill of health)?
In the meantime, I'm going to continue using the "repaired" library and restoring each affected or missing image one by one. I would hope that the "repaired" library will not suffer the same problems if and when it needs to be repaired again...
It appears that almost all of the issues affected more recent dates (past 6 months), though the thumbnail issue occurred with one of my oldest images.
I'd run a complete hardware check. Also check the RAM.
Have you also checked the card you are using with your camera? A problem with the card reader or the card can also be causing image corruption.
If you suspect a problem with the drive, I'd restore the library from your backup to an external drive and test the restored library on the external drive.
Deleting images does not reduce Photos Library size
