Deleting All Photos Library and Data -- Fusion Drive?

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Level 1

16 points

Deleting All Photos Library and Data -- Fusion Drive?

I have a huge (2.2TB) Photos library that I need to delete from my Mac because it is taking up too much space. I have copied/pasted it onto two separate external hard drives, so I feel as good as I can about hitting the delete button. Question is how do I do it?

I clicked on Macintosh HD and then went to Users/myname/Pictures and tried to delete the Photos Library, but maybe not surprisingly that didn't work. My Mac has a 3TB Fusion Drive. When I look at Disk Utility, it shows: Fusion Drive/Container disk2 and then has Macintosh HD (which shows only 11.2GB Used) and Macintosh HD - Data (which shows 2.99TB Used).

Any ideas about how I delete whatever I need to delete to free up space?

Thanks

Posted on Jul 2, 2020 9:26 PM

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Answer 1

donhoos66 Author

Level 1

16 points

Jul 2, 2020 9:38 PM in response to donhoos66

Also...do I need to do anything with the "Use as System Photo Library" in Preferences. Right now, the Photos "Library Location" is pointing to the external hard drive and is working...in other words, I can see all of my pictures. However, the "Use as System Photo Library" is not greyed out. Not sure what this means.

Additional note: I don't use iCloud Photo Library on my Mac, just on my iPhone and iPad. I manually transfer pics from those two devices onto my Mac.

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Answer 2

Yer_Man

Level 10

163,602 points

Jul 2, 2020 11:26 PM in response to donhoos66

I clicked on Macintosh HD and then went to Users/myname/Pictures and tried to delete the Photos Library, but maybe not surprisingly that didn't work.

How did you try and what happened? Any error messages?

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Answer 3

donhoos66 Author

Level 1

16 points

Jul 3, 2020 8:11 AM in response to Yer_Man

I right-clicked and moved it to Trash. Then I deleted Trash, thinking it would take a long time to delete all the files and that my storage capacity would dramatically increase. It only took less than a minute to delete and it really didn’t increase my storage capacity by much. Clearly deleting whichever Photos Library that was associated with my username at that point didn’t delete all of my files.

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Answer 4

donhoos66 Author

Level 1

16 points

Jul 3, 2020 8:13 AM in response to léonie

Photos was running but it was pointed to the Photos Library on the external hard drive. I disconnected the external hard drive before I tried to delete the library to make sure I didn’t delete the wrong library.

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Answer 5

donhoos66 Author

Level 1

16 points

Jul 3, 2020 11:50 AM in response to Yer_Man

When in doubt, turn off/on, right? I did so and now when I "Get Info" on my Macintosh HD, it is showing 2.4TB available. So that's good. However, what remains puzzling is that Disk Utility still says that the "Macintosh HD - Data" has 2.99TB Used. Does that makes sense? Thanks for your help.

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