iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Deleting Photos

As every photographer knows—make that every good photographer—not every photo is a keeper. 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. (You can see it nestled at the bottom of the Source list as shown in Figure 7-12.) When you want to purge a photo from your Photo Library, you 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 deleting some precious picture accidentally.

Figure 7-12. When you dump a photo into iPhoto’s Trash, it’s not really gone—it’s just relocated to the Trash folder. Clicking the Trash icon in the Source list displays all the photos in the Trash and makes the Info panel show the total number of trashed photos, their date range, and their sizes.

You can relegate items to the Trash by selecting one or more thumbnails in the Photo Library and doing 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.

To view the photos that you have piling up in the Trash, ...