Deleting Photos from iPhoto doesn't return hard drive memory

Hi,
I need more room on my hard drive. I have needed to pare down my photos for awhile, so I got information on my iPhoto library which was about 40gb and had about 12,500 photos. I spent hours deleting about 2500 photos and movies last night to try to recover hard drive space. I removed them by selecting move to trash or just hitting the delete key. The photos were removed from my libraries, but no memory was recovered (none of the photos ended up in the trash). I then restarted the program and computer to see if that helped to no avail. Any idea why the hard drive space is not recovered?

To remove photos you need to me in Library view - either Photos or Events - and when you hit delete the pics will go to the iPhoto trash. Then you have to empty the iPhoto Trash (that's in the iPhoto menu).
Tapping delete from an Album only removes the pics from that Album.
iPhoto has been known to be temperamental when deleting large numbers of files. Best to empty the trash every 100 images or so.
If space is an issue, you know you can move your Library to an external HD formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)?
1. Quit iPhoto
2. Copy the iPhoto Library from your Pictures Folder to the External Disk.
3. Hold down the option (or alt) key while launching iPhoto. From the resulting menu select 'Choose Library' and navigate to the new location. From that point on this will be the default location of your library.
4. Test the library and when you're sure all is well, trash the one on your internal HD to free up space.
Regards
TD

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