Delete and Recover Recently Deleted Photos and Videos

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can delete our photos and videos in the Photos app on the Mac, as well as recover any recently deleted photos and videos on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m in my Library here, and if we look, you’re going to see I have a couple of photos that are the same. Basically what I do, when I take photos, is I take two or three photos. And then I find the one that I really like, and I delete the others. Well, if we look here, you’re going to see I have a heart here by this photo here. So this is the one that I want to keep. I went through these photos, I found the one that I like, and now what I need to do is I need to delete the others. So I go back over to the other one here. I no longer need this photo.

So how do I delete it? Well, we have a few different ways to do that. It’s pretty simple. The first thing I have to do is I have to select it. We can see we have a blue border around it. And then the easiest way is just by hitting the delete key on your keyboard. When I do that, I need to confirm that I want to delete it. And once I delete it, it’s going to delete it from my library. I can also, let’s cancel this, I can also control click on this, hold down the control key and I click, and you’re going to see Delete. And then I also can do this through the menu bar. I go up under Image, and then we have Delete.

So let’s delete this. Let’s see what happens when we delete a photo. Where does it go? So now I delete this, hold down the delete key, I confirm that I want to delete it. It is no longer in my Library. So where did it go? Well, it doesn’t go into your trash here. It does not move it into the trash. What it does do is it moves it into it’s own trash called Recently Deleted. Its own album. So think of this as an album, an album of recently deleted photos and videos. So let’s open this up and you’re going to see we have my photo in here.

Now this photo will stay in here for about 40 days. After 40 days, it will be deleted permanently. So you do have a little bit of time to recover any photos that you accidentally deleted.

How do we recover a photo that we deleted? We just select it, and then we go over to Recover. When I click on Recover, it moves it back over to my Library. So now I click on Library and you’re going to see I have my photo here again.

Let’s say I wanted to delete it immediately. I click on it to delete it. And then I hit the delete key. I confirm that I want to delete it and moves it over to my Recently Deleted items, and we have my photo here. Now I want to delete this immediately. I select it. And instead of going over to Recover to the right, you’re going to see we have Delete 1 Photo. When I click on this, what it’s going to do is delete that photo immediately. I will no longer be able to recover it. So if you have photos that you want to delete immediately, you first have to delete them. So they go into your recently deleted album. And then what you do is you select them and then you can go and delete them immediately.

So that’s how we delete photos and videos in the Photos app on the Mac. We just select what we want to delete and hit the delete key. We confirm that we want to delete it. And then when we deleted, it moves it over into Recently Deleted. This is an album in the Photos app, anything that we’ve deleted will stay in there for about 40 days. After that, it will be deleted immediately. You can also delete them immediately yourself by selecting any photos and videos in that album, and then going to the upper right hand corner and deleting it. If you want to recover any photos and videos that you’ve deleted recently, you just select them and then you can recover them by going to the upper right-hand corner. You have about 40 days to recover anything that you’ve thrown away. After 40 days, it is not guaranteed that you can recover them.

So that’s how we delete as well as recover any photos and videos that we’ve deleted in the Photos app on the Mac.