Section 5.16. Deleting Photos | iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual

5.16. Deleting Photos

As every photographer knowswell, every good photographernot every photo is a keeper. So at some point, you'll probably want to delete some of your photos.

5.16.1. The iPhoto Trash

iPhoto has a private Trash can that works just like the Finder's Trash. It's sitting there at the bottom of the Source list. When you want to purge a photo from your Library, simply drag it to the Trash. Instead of deleting the photo immediately, iPhoto lets it sit there in the Trash "album," awaiting permanent disposal via the Empty Trash command. This feature gives you one more layer of protection against accidentally deleting a precious picture.

In the main thumbnails view, you can relegate items to the Trash by selecting one or more thumbnails in the Library (not in an album) and then performing one of the following:

Drag the thumbnails into the Trash.
Control-click (or right-click) a photo and choose Move to Trash from the shortcut menu.
Press -Delete or choose Photos Move to Trash.

Tip: To delete a photo from a smart album or from Edit mode, press Option-

-Delete.

To view the photos that you have sentenced to the great shredder in the sky, click the Trash icon, as shown in Figure 5-22. However, if you suddenly decide you don't really want to get rid of any of these trashed photos, it's easy to resurrect them: Just drag the thumbnails out of the Trash and onto the Library icon in the Source list. (Alternatively, you can Control-click the photo or photos and, from the shortcut menu, choose Restore to Photo Library.)

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Undeletable Photos?

iPhoto won't delete photos of my sister. I thought I got rid of a bunch of unflattering pictures of her the other day, and then I found them again when browsing through my Library. Why aren't they staying deleted?

Possibility 1: You deleted the pictures from an album instead of the Library itself (the first icon in the list). When you remove a photo from an album, it removes only a reference to that picture from the album, leaving the photo itself untouched in the Library.

If the pictures of your sister are really horrendous, click the Library icon in the Source list, move the offending photos to the Trash, and then empty the Trash. That'll get rid of them once and for all.

Possibility 2: You're trying to delete the photo from inside a smart album (Section 5.6.11). Remember, you have to delete such photos from the Library itself, or from the Last __ Months or Last __ Rolls collections.

You've just rescued them from photo-reject limbo and put them back into your main photo collection.

Tip: You can also move photos from the Trash back into your Library by selecting themyes, in the Trash "album"and then pressing

-Delete. Think of it as the un-Trash command.)

Figure 5-22. When you dump a photo into iPhoto's Trash, it's not really goneit's just relocated to the Trash folder. Clicking the Trash icon in the Source list displays all the photos in the Trash and makes the Info panel show the total number of trashed photos, their date range, and their sizes.

To permanently delete the photos in the Trash, choose iPhoto Empty Trash, or Control-click the Trash icon to access the Empty Trash command via a shortcut menu. iPhoto then displays an alert message, warning you that emptying the Trash removes these photos permanently and irreversibly.

(Of course, if you imported the photos from files on disk or haven't deleted them from your camera, you can still recover the original files and reimport them.)

Note: As you might expect, dragging photos into the Trash doesn't reduce the total size of your iPhoto Library by a single byte, because iPhoto is still storing a copy of each photo in its Trash folder. Only when you empty the Trash does the iPhoto Library folder actually shrink in size .

Whatever pictures you throw out by emptying the Trash also disappear from any albums you've created. ( Deleting a photo from an album is different.)

Note: If you use iPhoto to track photos that are not actually in iPhoto (they remain "out there" in folders on your hard drive), deleting them in iPhoto doesn't do much. They no longer show up in iPhoto, but they're still out there on the hard drive, right where they always were. See Section 4.2.4 for more on this external photo-tracking feature.