How to Clear the Photo App’s Hidden Trash.
Disk space is very expensive, especially if you have a laptop with limited memory. For many Macbook Pro owners, a standard 256GB flash drive is the most affordable option, but not the largest.
If you’re using your Macbook for serious photo or video editing work, then you know how quickly that space can fill up, so you move on to deleting items to make room for your newest projects.
The problem occurs when you delete files, but your storage does not grow. Deleting raw videos and high quality photos is the fastest way to free up space, but deleting them has no immediate effect on available memory. Here’s how to fix it.
How to find and empty the “hidden” trash in the Photos app
When you delete a photo or video in the macOS Mojave Photos app, it doesn’t end up in your regular Trash. Instead, it ends up in a hidden folder in Photos and stays there for 29 days.
This feature is introduced to ensure that you do not accidentally delete a precious photo or memory without any means or way to get it back. However, this creates an obstacle when you are trying to free up space to export your next short film.
Look at the Library tab in the Photos sidebar. When you’ve deleted a photo or video, it will appear under the Import heading in the Recently Deleted folder.
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If you open this folder, you will see all the photos that you have deleted and how much time is left before the system automatically deletes them. You can right-click individual photos or videos and permanently delete them before the time runs out to free up space immediately.
Alternatively, you can click the Delete All button in the upper right corner of the screen. This will delete all items in the folder. If you accidentally deleted something you didn’t want, just click Recover instead of deleting it to move it back to your Photo Library.
Keep in mind that even holding down the Command key and hitting Delete will not skip this step. If you want to free up storage space without waiting for the required 30 days, you will need to do this every time you delete photos.
Other ways to free up space
You may not want to delete images or videos. If so (but you still need more storage), you might consider using iCloud. For just $ 1.99 a month, you get 100GB of storage. For $ 9.99 a month, you get a full terabyte of storage.
Such a large space may seem like overkill, but it allows you to back up your device to the cloud with every update. It also gives you extra storage space for your photos and videos. You can free up space on your local computer while retaining all important data.
For those of you who want to be doubly confident in the security of your data, an external hard drive is another good choice. Just remember to transfer photos and videos from your computer to your drive regularly.
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