Safely delete Photos library

[boyashley]

My girlfriend has a MBA an it is full (less than 2gb).

It looks like the culprit is Photos, hogging about 30% of her 128gb drive. She never uses the application, ever (although she still uses iCloud to back up all the photos from her phone).

I have turned off iCloud Photo Library/Photo Stream/Photo-sharing inside the Photos app, assuming it would just remove them. But it appears they are all saved locally.

If they are ALL backed up to iCloud, and I have those syncing options turned off, can I delete the Photos.app contents? What I want to avoid is her logging back in one day, noticing they are all missing, then just wiping them from her iCloud account.

 

[Hellhammer]

MOD NOTE

Do NOT run the Terminal command in the post that was deleted. It is malicious and will install malware on your Mac.

 

[maflynn]

If you're not using the photos.app, then yes you can certainly delete it.

also consider using
Download and use OmniDiskSweeper. It will provide a sorted list of what's consuming your space. This may help find what else is chewing up the space.

 

[Weaselboy]

If they are ALL backed up to iCloud, and I have those syncing options turned off, can I delete the Photos.app contents? What I want to avoid is her logging back in one day, noticing they are all missing, then just wiping them from her iCloud account.

Yes you can, but just to be safe, what I would do is copy the Photos Library file from here computer off to an external drive just for safe keeping in case iCloud Photo goes nuts and you lose things.

Look in the users Pictures folder and you should se the file Photos library that contains all the images. Just drag and drop that to an external drive to make a copy then you can delete it from here internal drive and empty the trash to recover the disk space.