Unable to clear recently deleted in Photos for macOS

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Level 1

11 points

Unable to clear recently deleted in Photos for macOS

Photos seems to have randomly decided to not allow me to clear the recently deleted folder. I have several gigs of stuff in there I want to get rid of, but I can't. I have tried repairing the library several times, but it always hangs at 100%... I have let it sit for three days and still nothing. Activity monitor reports all photos processes are using 0% cpu time.

I've tried examining the library with PowerPhotos, but I don't see any options there for repair or rebuild. Has anyone seen this before? I need to be able to clear my library.

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012), OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Jan 26, 2017 11:22 AM

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Answer 1

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léonie

Level 10

195,025 points

Jan 26, 2017 12:04 PM in response to togaen

Then we are running the same version of macOS. I can clear the "Recently Deleted" album. Can you not empty it at all, or is it possible to select a few photos in "Recently Deleted" and then to delete the selected photos?

I had the problem on the iPhone, that I could not empty "Recently deleted" because the album contained too many photos. But after selecting only a few hundred photos in the album and then clicking "delete selected" items, I could get rid of the photos. It was rather tedious, because I had 30000 photos in Recently deleted.

Perhaps Photos on the Mac has the same glitch. Try to remove the photos from Recently deleted in smaller batches.

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Answer 2

togaen Author

Level 1

11 points

Jan 26, 2017 12:10 PM in response to léonie

TL;DR: Rebooted my machine, everything is fine now. Forgot the first law of tech support: turn it off and on again.

More details:

I was having the same issue with lots of photos and I came to the same conclusion... I was trying to delete tens of thousands of files, and it was working doing it in batches until it just decided to stop. I'd try selecting just one, or several, or all, then hit delete, and nothing happened. I'd quit and restart photos, try again, nothing. That's when I started trying to repair the library, restoring from backup, etc. No matter what I did, I kept having the same issue.

Just now I tried duplicating the library with PowerPhotos, but it said it couldn't because the library was in use. I had closed Photos, but there were some photos processes running in activity monitor, so I figured I'd just reboot the machine to kill anything that was running that shouldn't be. When it came back up, everything was working fine... could delete all the photos I wanted. So, I don't know exactly what happened, but somehow some process must have gotten orphaned and it was blocking access to whatever Photos needed to do the deletions.

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