How to delete, recover, and eradicate pictures and videos in Photos for OS X

Photos for OS X lets you quickly and easily delete pictures and videos from both your Mac and the cloud.

Whether you’re trying to free up storage, battling duplicates, eliminating personal photos no one else ever needs to see, or just cutting out the bad shots, Photos for OS X makes it easy to delete single or multiple pictures or videos. If you’re using iCloud Photo Library, anything you delete on your Mac will also be deleted on all your other iCloud Photo Library-enabled devices, including your iPhone and/or iPad. Deleted pictures and videos can be recovered for up to 30 days, however, or can be deleted immediately and forever. Here’s how!

• How to delete pictures or videos in Photos for OS X
• How to delete an entire “moment” in Photos for OS X
• How to recover deleted pictures or videos in Photos for OS X
• How to permanently delete pictures or videos in Photos for OS X

How to delete pictures or videos in Photos for OS X

You can select one picture or video by clicking on it, a range of pictures or videos by clicking on the first when, then shift-clicking on the last one, or a number of arbitrary pictures or videos by command-clicking on each of them in turn.

Launch the Photos app on your Mac.

Select on the pictures or videos you want to delete

Go to the Image > Delete Photo menu item. (You can also right-click, hit the delete key, or command + delete to skip the confirmation dialog.)

Click Delete to confirm, if needed.

How to delete an entire “moment” in Photos for OS X

You can also delete some or all of the pictures or videos intelligently grouped by Photos into a “moment”.

Launch the Photos app on your Mac.

Click on the Photos tab in the top navigation.

Go to the moment view and find the moment you want to delete.

Click on the first photo in the moment view you’d like to delete to select it.

Hold down the Shift key on your Mac’s keyboard and click on the last photo.

Go to the Image > Delete Photo menu item. (You can also right-click, hit the delete key, or command + delete to skip the confirmation dialog.)

Click Delete to confirm, if needed.

How to recover deleted pictures or videos in Photos for OS X

If you delete a picture or video by accident, or later regret it, you have 30 days to reverse it.

Launch the Photos app on your Mac.

Go to the File > Show recently deleted menu item.

Click on the pictures or videos you want to recover.

Click on the Recover button at the top right.

How to permanently delete pictures or videos in Photos for OS X

If you want to make sure a deleted picture or video is eradicated immediately and can’t be recovered, you can do that as well.

Launch the Photos app on your Mac.

Go to the File > Show recently deleted menu item.

Click on the pictures or videos you want to permanently delete.

Click on the Delete button at the top right.