Saving recently deleted photos from Photos library on Mac without restoring

I hate throwing stuff away-- it's so permanent!

The easiest thing would be to make a copy of your Entire Library, just command-D to duplicate it. Then double click to open that in Photos, delete everything else, and then Restore from Recently Deleted. Then you'd have a second Library with just the old stuff. You could rename it appropriately, and store it away with other backup things. To do this, though, you need enough space to temporarily hold both Libraries. With an external drive, you can just drag the original Library to the drive, and you'd have two copies, but only the original would be on your internal drive.

Speaking of backups, you could just keep the whole Library copy as a backup. You'd want to Restore the Recently Deleted stuff, but I can't see how you would separate those from the main pictures.

Again, speaking of backups (and not throwing stuff away,) I use a Time Machine backup, and I also copy my Photos Libraries (I have several) to external drives. I plug in the Time Machine drive to my MacBook about once a day.

I have been clearing out my "Favorites" Library. As I find pictures that shouldn't be in Favorites, but that I don't want to lose, I move them to a "To Be Removed" album. Then, when that has a bunch in it, I move that album to another Library named "Removed From Favorites." To make it easy to handle pictures in multiple Libraries I use the trusted 3rd party app PowerPhotos ($40) In fact, PowerPhotos is open on my Mac any time I'm using Photos.

What do you think?

"if only there was a " Restore To " option. "

One thing you can also do with the items in the "Recently Deleted" to save them is to drag them out of Recently Deleted to your Desktop or another folder in the Finder. Then save this folder somewhere.

Yes, there is a way you can save those photos. Do the following:

1 - go into the Recently Deleted album and select all photos (⌘+A)

2 - bring up the Keyword pane (⌘+K) and add a unique keyword to all of the photos.

3 - Restore all of the photos in the Recently Deleted album

4 - create a new Smart Album that has the following criteria:

4 - select all of the photos in the smart album and export them with either of these two options depending on your requirements:

5 - export the to a folder on the Desktop and store wherever you need.

I just tested the above in Sequoia and it works as intended.

NOTE: if you use the first export option you can include the metadata, title, keywords, descriptions and location:

KateEU wrote: …if only there was a " Restore To " option.

I see what you mean-- that's why I use that "To Be Removed" album. But pictures can be "in" many albums at once, so when I move a picture to TBR, it's still in the old album, too. So I transfer TBR to another Library and then Trash them, so they are removed from all albums at once. I've been doing it that way, because I didn't at first!

Be careful about storage room-- you need some free space on the drive to move stuff around.

KateEU wrote: …if I delete the photos I don't need - will they go into the recently deleted folder too ?

Well, yeah. That kinda got me! But you can tell which is which by the number of days left before automatic permanent deletion:

If you're not doing these the same day as you did the others, then there should be no problem. They're in the order they were deleted, in any case.

You can try a few pictures and see how obvious it is. And the great thing is, if you mess up, you still have the original Library, so nothing will really be lost!

Old Toad wrote: Yes, there is a way you can save those photos. Do the following:

…

2 - bring up the Keyword pane (⌘+K) and add a unique keyword to all of the photos.

You're right! I was completely convinced that I had tried modifying pictures in Recently Deleted and found that it was not possible. I un-learn something new every day!

When your removed photos are in another library you can try to import this library into your existing library (just go through the motions but do not actually import it again).

The most recent versions of Photos allow you to select another Photos Library to import from in the "File > Import" dialog. Select the library you have saved the deleted items to, then click "Check for Import".

Photos should be showing you a list of "new" photos, that are not in your current library. Take a screenshot so you remember which items should be checked. Then click "cancel", so you do not actually import these items again.