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Don't think you're deleting anything from iPhoto if you get rid of a picture in any of the folders within iPhoto.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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iPhoto's nasty little secret: Pictures seldom get deleted


April 28, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   I love iPhoto. But one little quirk of iPhoto drove me batty until I finally understood what was going on. The problem? iPhoto doesn't like to get rid of pictures.
   Don't get me wrong. You can "cut" photos (using the "Cut" menu item or by pressing Cmd-X) and you can do an operation called "Remove from album." The pictures might even disappear from view.
   But never doubt that Apple has a few surprises in store. When you delete a picture from any folder that you've created in iPhoto, it never really goes away. It's still in the Photo Library. The only way to get rid of it is to delete it from the library itself. I'll explain how to do this shortly.
   I'm sure Apple has what it thinks is a good reason for this behavior. Maybe it wants to keep all its iPhoto users from accidentally deleting a picture. But I suspect most users simply end up with a Mac version of "The Creature that Ate Chicago." When you waste your time trying to delete pictures that won't go away, you're also wasting a great deal of space on your computer's hard drive, and iPhoto can end up barely able to run at all.
   It's odd that this kind of organizational flaw is so troublesome in a program praised for its photo-organizing prowess. I've asked Apple to reconsider the way iPhoto handles deletions in the hope that future versions will offer a choice. You should be able to choose between removing a photo from a catalog or removing it from the actual library.
   Here's why iPhoto works the way it does:
   Every digital photo you put into iPhoto goes into the Photo Library. Pictures don't go anywhere else. Even if you make a dozen folders of your own, photos don't go there. They go into the Photo Library and that's all.
   (And, no, I'm not kidding. Pictures don't go into any other folders. They go only into the Photo Library.)
   So when you create your own folder and drag pictures into it, you're not actually dragging pictures into it -- you're not actually dragging the image files. iPhoto makes every effort to fool you, but it does not move or copy any pictures into your own folders. It creates aliases -- shortcuts or pointers, in geek talk -- and that's all.
   So now the problem might start becoming clear. Your Photo Library has all the pictures. Delete a picture from the library and it's gone. Delete a picture from one of the folders you've created in iPhoto, and the alias is gone; the picture is still there in your Photo Library.
   This offers some obvious advantages. One is that you can drag the same photo to many different folders within iPhoto without creating multiple copies of the photo. All you're doing is creating multiple aliases. They take up very little space. Another advantage: Accidentally deleting a photo from one of your folders won't cause a problem; you still have the original in the Photo Library.
   But the big problem remains. Don't think you're deleting anything from iPhoto if you get rid of a picture in any of the folders within iPhoto. You're just zapping a pointer. To delete a photo, you must go into the Photo Library and do it there.