{"id":46256,"date":"2024-12-23T16:35:33","date_gmt":"2024-12-23T21:35:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=46256"},"modified":"2024-12-23T18:43:04","modified_gmt":"2024-12-23T23:43:04","slug":"deleting-unused-photos-from-apple-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/23\/deleting-unused-photos-from-apple-photos\/","title":{"rendered":"Deleting Unused Photos From Apple Photos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&rsquo;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 <em>all<\/em> the photos that are not referenced by projects (calendars and photo books).<\/p>\n<p>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?)<\/p>\n<p>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 <strong>referenced<\/strong> condition, but I think that refers to files that have not been copied into the library.<\/p>\n<p>This <a href=\"https:\/\/talk.tidbits.com\/t\/deleting-unused-photos-from-apple-photos-mac\/14623?u=mjtsai\">TidBITS-Talk thread<\/a> recommends adding keywords to photos that are referenced, but that doesn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t show anything about keywords.<\/p>\n<p>What ended up working was creating a new album called <strong>In Projects<\/strong>. Photos <em>does<\/em> 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 <em>not<\/em> in the <strong>In Projects<\/strong> album.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&rsquo;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2024-12-23T21:35:35Z","apple_news_api_id":"3eade3e2-1730-42eb-a6af-8d2f1937b549","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2024-12-23T23:43:06Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAg==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/APq3j4hcwQuumr40vGTe1SQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1016,1142,30,2598,927,174],"class_list":["post-46256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-datacide","tag-icloud-photo-library","tag-mac","tag-macos-15-sequoia","tag-photos-app","tag-storage"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46256"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46260,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46256\/revisions\/46260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}