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I am using MacOS BigSur / Photos 6.0

I have photos in the Album that I want to delete completely from everywhere. If I delete it found in the Album, it still keeps the photo in the Library, so in order to delete it completely - I have to search for it in the Library and delete it from there - it is very inconvenient.

How to delete it from Album and Library at the same time?

Whey I use : Cmd + Delete, Option + Cmd + Delete on the photo in the Album it does not remove photo from Library.

3 Answers 3

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Deleting photos from an album only deletes them from that album, not from the library or from any other albums they are in (A photo can belong to more than one album). Deleting photos from the library removes them completely from the library as well as all the albums they are in.

To completely delete photos that are in the Album from the library as well as albums they're in, open the album. Click Edit > Select All (or the unwanted photos) > "i" (Info) icon.

Info window

In the Keywords field, add a keyword that you haven't used previously. This will add it to all the selected photos.

In the sidebar, click the Library tab > in Search, type the keyword you added. The unwanted photos' thumbnails will be displayed. Select all, and delete.

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The following is for Photos 7.0 under MacOS 12.6.1, I'm not sure if it holds for older versions.

If you select the photos in an album and hit command-delete (rather than just delete) it will delete them from both the album and the library.

You can confirm this by looking at the context menu: if you right-click to pull up the menu for one or more photos, then hit command while the menu is visible, you will see the "remove photo from album" menu item change to "delete photo". Also, if you select one or more photos and click on the Image menu, then hit command while that menu is visible, you will see the "remove photo from album" menu item change to "delete photo" and the associated keyboard shortcut icons change from delete to command-delete.

I just discovered this by accident as I'm used to hitting command-delete in Finder to remove files and was shocked to notice the photos I was removing from albums were also being deleted from the library. Fortunately we can choose either behavior.

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You have to delete it from the library to delete the photo.

To speed this up, use the Keyword Manager to make a keyword for deletion and assign a keyboard shortcut. Tag the photos and then move on or delete from the album.

Later you can make a smart search or just ad-hoc search in the full library and bulk delete. If you do this often, an automation to bulk delete might help if you need this routinely.

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