I’ve started working on a much-needed cleanup of Mac Photos libraries. Deleting duplicates, similars, etc. In a few camp/event-specific libraries, I have Albums and Slideshow projects set up. And I want to keep those as-is. I don’t want to delete any of those photos.
The problem is I am unable to find a way to show me “photos which are unused.” I know I can create a Smart Album of photos not in any Album, but it seems like there is no way to do something similar for Slideshow projects. And I am not able to find anything in the interface which will help me identify, given any specific photo, what albums or slideshows it is a part of.
One thing that you could do is to select all photos in a slideshow (Cmd-A with the slideshow open), then type Cmd-I (or the menu option Window / Info), which will bring up the info window for all selected photos; it should show the count of photos at the top of the window. Then add a keyword (“slideshow”?) to each of them in the info window. Once you’ve done that for all of your slideshows, you can then create a smart album for all photos that include the keyword “slideshow” and then you’ll have an album with those photos in them.
Check out the Powerphotos app. It has many tools for managing a Photos library:
I use it to archive old photos to a separate library to keep the active library a reasonable size. I wish that the Photos app had this feature built in.
Doug, Thank you! This suggestion to tag the photos in the slideshows has worked out great! I was able to use it on the first library to remove almost 700 pictures, about ½ of the library size.
Using this on the remaining libraries will allow me to clean them up prior to using PowerPhotos to merge the libraries together.
Nearly 2 years since this topic was started but my question is related…
I have migrated a Photos library to a new Mac but want to save disk (SSD?!) space by deleting thousands of photos.
I have many albums with photos that I wish to delete. I can manually select each album, Cmd-A to select all photos, press Delete, confirm the deletion of the photos then Ctrl-click on the album, select Delete and confirm deletion of the album.
This is very tedious when I have dozens of albums to process.
I suppose I can try to create an automation to simplify this process (i.e. maybe add a script to the contextual menu when I Ctrl-click on the album). Just wondering if anyone has done this successfully?
You can always put less desired photos in their own album, which would work well with Powerphotos. I would also run the Find Duplicates and then click on the button on top, which then runs all the duplicate merging processes.
And also, if you hold the Option key down, you will not get the pesky confirmation dialog. I wish there was a setting for that for “Advanced Players”
I tried using Automator to record the above keystrokes but it did not work as intended. For example, it comes up with “delete 3 photos” instead of “deleted selected photos”. Also there doesn’t seem to be a way to add the workflow to the contextual menu.
Deleting a photo from an album does not delete the file. It just removes the photo from the album. If you are trying to get rid of the photo entirely, you need to delete it from the Library. Even then, the photo is moved to a trash-like “Recently Deleted” folder, not immediately deleted.
An album is just a virtual collection, analogous to a Playlist in Music. A photo can appear in more than one album. They are not copies, just the same photo displayed in more than one album. The photo remains in the Library regardless of whether it is in any albums.
In my Photos (Ventura) if I right click on a photo in any album, I get both options for “Remove 1 Photo from Album” (not what you’re looking for) as well as “Delete 1 Photo” (what you want to get rid of the actual file on disk to free up space). And if I select multiple photos that number will properly increment.
So if you know that every single photo in a certain album can be safely wiped from your disk, just go to that album, select all (cmd-a), and choose Delete from the contextual menu (right click).
And as @jajvj1 correctly points out, to recover the actual disk space you then still need to go to Photo’s Recently Deleted folder and choose there to permanently delete the trashed pics (or recover if you change your mind, last chance).
Thanks for the tips. I more or less described these steps in my original post.
I am looking for a way to automate these steps so I can clear out thousands of photos after a recent migration of data from an old Mac.
One question. Do you use iCloud Photos? And if so, would using its optimize feature on your Mac (which stores thumbnails only and downloads full-size versions as needed) save you the space you need without forcing you to delete thousands of photos (and presumably track them in another library)?
Another approach might be to duplicate your entire library to a large external drive and then remove a few years of the oldest photos from the one left on your SSD. (Selecting photos manually seems like a crazy amount of work compared to simply deleting everything from before 2010, for instance.) You might be able to use PowerPhotos to merge the two later on, if you wanted to keep a single library with everything in it on that large external drive.
Yes - i have considered these options. I have several archived Photos libraries on external drives that I can access with any of my Macs.
But I was looking for a quick way to delete all the photos in selected albums on my new MacBook Air M2. For example, I want to retain old holiday albums and some work-related albums going back decades.
Evidently Ventura takes up much more disk space than Mojave and I needed to delete photos to give me workable disk space after migrating apps and data from Mojave on a Retina Macbook to the MBA - both with 512Gb.
In hindsight I should have gone for 1Tb on the MBA!