iPhoto: How do I delete a photo from photos but keep it in an album?

[Marianallo]

snberk103 & ChrisA,
thanks. I understand now. My reaction is gawkkk. If I had wanted a relational database I would have used one. What I wanted is a photo album. If I want a photo to be in two albums, I'll make a copy. However, I'll give iPhoto more time before I start looking for a replacement.

Dave

Totally agree with you. Once I put the photo in an album, or create x numbers of albums, I would like for the picture to stop showing up in the Photos stream. Is there a way to "opt-in" or "opt-out" of this ?

 

[bsadamsart@ yahoo.com]

I want to keep my photos organized in albums in iPhoto, and remove them from photos once they have been added to an album. But when I delete the photo from photos, it disappears from the album as well and ends up only in the trash. If I "Put Back" in trash, it goes back to both photos and the album. Clearly I am missing something about how iPhoto works...

I've tried both cut followed by paste (which does not remove the photo from photos), and copy, paste to album, then delete from photos. So actually I have two questions: second one being why doesn't cut remove the original?

 

[Zephar77]

Yes, you are missing a key point about iPhoto....

iPhoto is a Digital Asset Manager (DAM) which means it is different than just nested folders.

With a DAM (Aperture, Lightroom, Capture One, and a couple others are also DAMs) your photo is either parked inside a hidden folder structure (iPhoto) or often moved to a visible date ordered folder structure when you 'import' your photos. What an 'import' means, at the fundamental level, is that the DAM creates an entry in its database. After that all the edits you make, all the keywords you add, all the Albums (or Collections) you move the image into are simply notations in the database record for that image. The image itself never physically moves or changes.

When you are in iPhoto and add an image to an Album, all that happens is that iPhoto makes a note that the photo appears in that Album. There is no 'real' Album that exists.. it is virtual. Which means you can put the photo into as many Albums as you want, and each instance is actually pointing at a singular original image tucked safely way. There is no storage penalty for having multiple copies of an image in several Albums. Edits and other changes to an image in one Album are reflected wherever that photo appears. But it still really exists in just one place. Deleting a photo from an Album only means that you are deleting the reference for the photo in that Album in iPhoto's database. The photo itself is not being deleted.... it is just the database entry being changed to eliminate the notation that the photo can be found in a particular Album

However, when you Delete the photo from 'Photos' you are actually mucking about with the real, actual photo. Delete the photo and you Deleting the original image, that is safely tucked away. And iPhoto then deletes the references to that photo in the database since those notations no longer point at a real photo. Put it back, and iPhoto is smart enough to rebuild the database record.

Hope this helps. Search this Photo forum on my name to see lots more of what I've written, along with what others have written about this topic. There is a wealth of knowledge there.

Luck.

If you do not want a photo to show up in library photos in recents, what I do, and I wanted to do exactly as you described, but realized that it is impossible, is under the menu select image, change the date to something much earlier so the photo moves to the beginning of your library. You probably will never see it unless you hit the home button on the extended keyboard on your iMac, which takes you to the very beginning when you started your library. In my case it was 2011, but I imported pictures from a camera taken earlier in my life and I dated each of them dating back to the 1960s. So I can chronologically correct the date so they show up when they were actually taken, way before computers for event commercially available. Unfortunately, they do not have an equivalent Home button on an iOS device and you have to scroll through tens of thousands of pictures to get to the beginning of your library. But what you can do as years, and select the earliest year that shows and that will take you to the beginning of your library. As the gentleman here described that anything in an album is not really a picture but only something like an alias that points to the picture in your photo library. Anything you delete in an album I’ll give you the option to delete from album or delete from library, or both . But if you delete a photo from the library it will disappear from the album.
So best to do on a desktop iMac. This does not do exactly what you and I wish to do, but it does remove the picture from recent photos showing up that you have taken and group them with pictures earlier in your library. I pick a date like 1999, or 1965 or 1949 so it will be the beginning of the library where you usually do not see, unless you wish to and get there by selecting years.
Hope this helps or give you some ideas. Best, Seth

 

[Zephar77]

One important thing I forgot to mention, if you have a lot of pictures you would wish to not visualize in recent photos you can select as many as you’d like to change the date under the menu item, Image/Change date. This will change the date of all the pictures you have selected. Very handy when you import photos taken on a camera earlier in your life before all this technology was available. It turns out to keep your library very neat and chronologically correct

 

[robgendreau]

Just a heads up...this is a zombie thread; check the dates. Pretty sure the questions have been answered