Delete From iPhoto Album, iTunes Playlist, iView Database

With so many documents organized in data bases these days, primarily music in iTunes, and photos in iPhoto and iView MediaPro, I find it more and more important to clean my databases of junk, music I never listen to, photos I never look at, if you have used any of these programs you likely know what I mean. How to clean it up?

Now the problem is that all these programs are based on databases, and they refer to media files on your hard disk. When you just hit the Delete key, chances are the item gets removed from the current album, and maybe from the database, but probably not from the hard disk. This, of course, is worse, because now your chances of cleaning up your junk are even slimmer than before.

What you want to do is to delete the item not only from the album/playlist, and database but also from the hard disk. While this is of course possible, I find it frustrating, that every program uses a different key combination to accomplish this task, and I find myself looking up the key combination every time anew. Between iView and Apple I might be able to understand this, but even Apple is inconsistent:

• To delete a song from a Playlist in iTunes and put the underlying audio file in the trash, hit Option Delete.
• To delete a picture from an Album in iPhoto and put the underlying image file in the trash, hit Command Option Delete.
• To delete a picture from the Database in iView MediaPro and put the underlying image file in the trash, hit Command Delete.

In summary:

• iTunes: Option Delete
• iPhoto: Command Option Delete
• iView: Command Delete

There you have it, three essentially identical tasks, three different combinations of Command, Option, and Delete. I personally think that Option Delete makes the most sense. Will this ever be adopted universally? I don’t hold my breath.