Deleted and Erased Photos Still Remain in Library
MacBook Pro M3 Max 64GB
Sonoma 14.3.1
Photos Version 9.0 (630.0.150)
My wife and I have terabytes of photos. Part of the process in managing these, I'm splitting Photos libraries by date to create smaller, less cumbersome ones. Note that none of these libraries are the Photos system library nor are they shared.
Say I have a Photos library A with photos from 2000 to 2024. I want to split this into two libraries - Lib A: 2000 thru 2014 and LibB: 2015 thru 2024. Do do this (just looking at LibB) I've:
- duplicated library A and renamed copy to B
- Create Smart Album in LibB with photos within a date range 2000 thru 2014
- Delete photos from the Smart Album
- Erase photos from Recently Deleted
Problem - while LibB now only shows photos from 2015 thru 2024 and Photos library info says it contains 8K photos and it's 30GB, the library package size still shows 500GB AND, when I attempt to merge LibB into another library, ALL 60K photos from 2000 thru 2024 show up in Review for Import.
I have copied LibB to another drive. Same issue. I am currently repairing this library to see if this fixes the issue. Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated!