Cleaning the garbage out of Aperture

Question

I have read many posts about dealing with previews to reduce the size of the Aperture library but few discuss getting rid of images (masters, previews everything) that will never be looked at and serve no purpose.  I mark all garbage images (out of focus, eyes closed ect) with an "x" by hitting the "9" button when asigning a rating on review.  I also mark many images that I will never look at, such as 19 out of the 20 images I took of a lion sleeping or of a bird in flight.  These images are still in my library and probably take up a moderate amount of room.  Does it make any sense to actually delete them and the rebuild the Aperture library so it only contains stuff that might be viewed?
I have a Mac Pro with 1.5 T of drive space so this is not the issue, yet.  Just seems dumb to keep all this garbage year after year.

Answer 1

Deleting something permanently, whether out of Aperture or off the HD is really a personal call. No one here can tell you if it makes 'sense'.
You'll certainly gain (some) disk space how much in relationship to the total library size will vary greatly depending on the file type, if previews are generated for the image and how big the preview is. Deleting obviously 'bad' images (lens cap on, flash failed to fire, etc) makes some 'sense'. Its unlikely these images will ever be any good for anything.
Where it becomes more of a gray area are the rest, images were you don't like the composition or lighting or whatever. There have been any number of time when I've gone into my box of rejected slides (yes I'm of the never throw out anything school) and looked at something that was obviously bad when I first looked at it but now I see something I missed the first time.
Take your case of those 20 Lion images. If you can really say with absolute certainty that 19 of those images don;t deserve to live then delete away but if you're not 100% certain remember disk is cheap.
There are a number of steps you could take to reduce library size, you could delete the previews for these images )previews can eat up a ton of space)  you could export all these image as a new library and store it offline.
One thing you won;t have to do if you delete these images; There is no need to rebuild the library to reclaim the space they took up.
regards