Deleting Unused Photos From Apple Photos
I’ve been trying to reduce the storage that the Photos app uses, both on my Mac and in iCloud. I use Lightroom for my photo library, so I would like to delete all the photos that are not referenced by projects (calendars and photo books).
Unfortunately, Photos is unable to display any of my projects from before December 2018, so I guess those are lost causes. (Maybe in theory I could restore from a really old backup with older versions of macOS and Photos and prevent it from syncing with iCloud Photos?)
Focusing on the newer ones, my first thought was to create a smart album of photos that are not referenced by any projects/albums. Photos does have a referenced condition, but I think that refers to files that have not been copied into the library.
This TidBITS-Talk thread recommends adding keywords to photos that are referenced, but that doesn’t seem to be possible with projects and the current version of Photos. If I select photos in a project, there are no relevant menu commands enabled, and the Info window doesn’t show anything about keywords.
What ended up working was creating a new album called In Projects. Photos does let you add to an album from within a project. So I did this for each project, adding the photos that were placed to the album. Then I created a smart album for photos that were not in the In Projects album.
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Hi Michael,
Are you familiar with https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos ?
Not sure if their public API supports what you need our of the box, but it has enough information on the SQLite/Core Data backing store, you might be able to figure out how to create a query to search for such photos. You might find info on your older projects there, even if the UI doesn't allow access.
@Léo I first looked at PowerPhotos, which is a good app but doesn’t seem to have any support for projects. I think maybe PhotoKit only allows them to be accessed within the context of a Photos extension?
Looking at the database directly is a good idea. I think what I should do going forward is export all the photos that a project depends on when I print it and store that folder outside of Photos.
I removed all my photos off of iCloud a few months ago as well as Google Drive and backed them up to a external SSD and use iCloud sparingly. I still have a lot of my old photos on OneDrive, but paying for cloud storage is not one can afford to do continuously. If you want to share photos you can always use email.
