Knowing When Deleted Is Not Gone
Knowing when deleted is not gone
The thing about deleting pictures from your Photos Library is that they’re gone.
I know. That seems stupidly obvious and not worthy of a 5 minute read. But I suspect it’s a bigger deal than you think because deleting photos wakes our decision alert. Don’t want to make a “wrong” decision! What if I need that picture “someday?” But she’s SO CUTE in that one. And that one. And that one. And THAT one. There’s so many good ones; I’ll just keep them all. Because if I delete one, then it’s gone and I can never get it back.
Not quite, as it turns out.
Apple is really big on preserving your pictures. They want you to have a great photo experience, with no regrets. But a part of that great photo experience is keeping your library pared down to the most important, most timeless images. Otherwise the clutter is overwhelming and the really meaningful pictures get lost and forgotten. Deleting photos though, even the lesser ones, is literally deleting a moment of our lives, and our decision alert - the “gone forever” one - can derail the best intentions.
Recently Deleted Album on the Mac
So to make the process more appealing, Apple created a “Recently Deleted” album in every Photos Library. When you delete a photo, it doesn’t go directly to the trash as you would expect, but to the Recently Deleted album which acts like a sort of delayed action trash bin. “Deleted” photos sit there and are recoverable for about a month before being finally purged from the library. If you have second thoughts, or you realize that you deleted the wrong picture by mistake, you can go into the album, select the image you want back, and tap/click the Recover button to put it back into the library as before.
Spending 5-10 minutes per day going through your photos and deleting or moving pictures you don’t want in your Photos library is a super way to keep your slideshows, memories, and the All Photos collection groomed and relevant. It also helps Apple Photos understand what and who is important to you as it curates your Memories and timeline collections (Years, Months, Days). So it's a good exercise and an important part of photo management.
Hopefully the understanding that Deleted is not gone, at least for a month, will encourage you to be less anxious about the edit process and encourage you to keep your collection neat and clean.