If you use iPhoto to manage your photos and you have deleted a bunch of them either because they weren’t so good or perhaps moved to other library using iPhoto Library Manager, you notice that disk space hasn’t been freed. Fear not.

iPhoto Trash

iPhoto uses its own trashcan to store deleted photos for easy retrieval. You can view the contents of trash by clicking its icon in the left pane in the Recent section.

Empty iPhoto Trash

To free your disk space of these deleted photos you have to simply empty the trashcan. To do so, just push Empty Trash button in the upper right corner if you are inside the Trash.

Or at any time select “Empty iPhoto Trash” from the iPhoto menu as seen below.

Now it prompts you with the usual confirmation:

And when you agree, it will move the photos to the Mac OS X system Trash.

Empty Trash

After the iPhoto Trash has been emptied, the files are now in system Trash and to finally free disk space, this also must be emptied. This is done as usual, by right-clicking (Ctrl-clicking) the Trashcan and selecting “Empty Trash“. Again, it will prompt you with confirmation, but this time it includes all the files in the Trash so be sure to be sure. 😉

Safety net

As you see, freeing disk space from deleted photos can be a long walk, but after all, photos might just be our most valuable files on our computers as they are impossible to recreate.

Always make (several) backups of your photos to be sure not to loose them.