iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Deleting Photos

As every photographer knows—make that every good photographer—not every photo is a keeper. So at some point, you’ll probably want to delete some of your photos.

The iPhoto Trash

iPhoto has a private Trash can that works just like the Finder’s Trash. It’s sitting there at the bottom of the Source list. When you want to purge a photo from your Library, simply drag it to the Trash. Instead of deleting the photo immediately, iPhoto lets it sit there in the Trash “album,” awaiting permanent disposal via the Empty Trash command. This feature gives you one more layer of protection against accidentally deleting a precious picture.

In the main thumbnails view, you can relegate items to the Trash by selecting one or more thumbnails in the Library (not in an album) and then performing one of the following:

• Drag the thumbnails into the Trash.

• Control-click a photo and choose Move to Trash from the shortcut menu.

• Press ⌘-Delete or choose Photos → Move to Trash.

Tip

To delete a photo from a smart album or from Edit mode, press Option-⌘-Delete.

To view the photos that you have sentenced to the great shredder in the sky, click the Trash icon, as shown in Figure 5-21. However, if you suddenly decide you don’t really want to get rid of any of these trashed photos, it’s easy to resurrect them: Just drag the thumbnails out of the Trash and onto the Library icon in the Source list. (Alternatively, you can Control-click the photo or photos and, from the shortcut menu, choose Restore to Photo Library.) ...