Turns out that Photos does pretty sophisticated library management; enough so that you're not duplicating space if you're migrating from iPhoto or Aperture. If you've migrated an existing iPhoto or Aperture photo library to Photos, Photos creates a brand new library structure but doesn't, in point of fact, duplicate your images. Instead it creates links to the original and preview versions of your images.
We can end up with dozens of duplicates, especially when shooting in raw, and then once you start editing, dozens more could be generated. All of this takes up space, and it can take a lot of time to sort and delete manually, or you can try a few of these shortcuts. Find and remove duplicate photos manually. Every photo is special. I thought that Apple had solved the local storage problem and made it simpler, but they seem to have repeated some prior problems of iPhoto Libraries. First, it appears you can indeed delete all your new local Photo Library items. However, when you want to look at them in Photos on Mac again it will re-download them all again. Nov 10, 2017 My library folders in the explorer are all messed up because I changed the default locations and for some reason it created additional libraries. I was trying to delete them but don't know how? There is no option when you right click, or in properties? You can create but not delete. Can you easily restore defaults?
When you're looking at your Photos library in the Finder, it includes all of your original images and previews. But the images exist only in one location on your hard drive, even if you have multiple photo libraries.
Here's what Apple has to say for people anxious to pull the delete trigger:
After you migrate your iPhoto or Aperture library to Photos, you might feel tempted to delete your original iPhoto or Aperture library. Because the migrated library takes little additional space, you don't need to delete the original library.
So don't do it, even if you're tempted to.
You can still use your original photo library with iPhoto (version 9.6.1, as of this writing) and Aperture (version 3.6) after you've migrated it to Photos. Just bear in mind that any changes you make in iPhoto or Aperture will be resident only in those applications, not Photos. So if you make new image edits in Aperture or create a new iPhoto album, those will only appear in their respective apps, not Photos.
(Hat tip: Dave Sanderson)
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