I delete them and go to File-->Show Recently Deleted and then I select them from the Recently Deleted folder and choose the option to permanently delete but it still doesn't free up any disk space. Is there any way to free space without waiting for 30 days? It seems like Apple did this intentionally to get you to buy iCloud storage.
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How to permanently delete photos in the Photos app to free up disk space?
- Thread starter illiniry
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Do you still have the iPhoto library on your drive? If you converted an iPhoto library to Photos, the same image files are shared by both apps (it's called a "hard link"). You have to delete the image in both iPhoto and Photos (or delete the iPhoto library altogether) before the image file will actually be deleted from the drive.
Yes I do, I didn't realize I could safely delete it. Thanks so much for the info. I came across this helpful article after reading your post:
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2015/02/11/photos-mac-iphoto-import/
So if I delete the iPhoto library, then anything I delete in Photos Library will free up disk space right? Is there any point in backing up the iPhoto library to an external HD if I delete it?
Right. Once you have just the Photos library on-disk, a deletion from Photos will free-up disk space.
Backups are always a good idea, at least until you're confident everything is actually present in Photos. Bear in mind that after you delete the iPhoto library, the hard linking is permanently gone - if you re-import a iPhoto library copied to an external disk you will have two copies of each master image (I would hope restoring the iPhoto library from Time Machine would restore the hard links, but I don't know for sure).