Safe to delete? Multiple Photos libraries and old iPhoto library

[Arthur]

@jec0047

As far as iPhoto goes, take a look at this thread . Pay particular attention to the advice given by @bowline and @tomalmy, and ignore the advice given by one @jec0047.

For your (possibly) redundant Photos libraries, I share the previous paranoias expressed by @geoffaire and @timo. Delete them if you must, but make sure you have viable archives.

@jec0047, @Timo, @geoffaire - thank you for the replies.

Some followup for you:

After backing up and then deleting the old migrated iPhoto libraries and the redundant Photos libraries, emptying the Trash folder and re-booting, I was pleasantly surprised to see that almost 190 GB of storage was recovered. "About This Mac > “Storage” now reports 756 GB available. “Get info” for the iMac HDD now indicates 249 GB used, compared to 560 GB available and 440 GB used before.

Others in this forum, including the referenced thread above (Photos and iPhoto), state that old iPhoto libraries and extra Photos libraries simply contain links rather than actual image files. Deleting these should not really recover substantial disk space, but that was not my experience. The reported disk space used changed from 440 GB to 249 GB.

I suspect that there may be some ambiguity in the way that Finder’s “Get info” and  "About This Mac > “Storage” report disk space used. Could it be that the actual files and the linked files are reported twice, indicating more disk space reported as used than is actually used?

Knowing the actual disk space used is important for my situation. I would be more comfortable with 249 GB used on a 500 GB SSD rather than 440 used on a 500 GB SSD.