How can I delete Apple OS X application such as Photos, iPhoto, and others that I never use?
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Related: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/9184/can-i-delete-any-of-the-default-apps-the-come-with-os-x – nohillside Oct 27 '17 at 07:17
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1Does this answer your question? Is it possible to delete the "useless" apps pre-installed on my Mac? – anki Aug 13 '20 at 21:07
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@grgarside: El Capitan and later won't let you just rm the default apps, they're protected. – grgarside 11 mins ago
That's because of El Capitan's System Integrity Protection System (SIPS), which prevents even Root from making (potentially harmful) changes to the system. A fine idea in principle, apart from the fact that it stops you doing a lot of things whose "integrity" to the system is spurious –such as changing the speech bubble colour in Messages, or deleting pointless Apple apps you never use.
You can disable SIPS by booting into Recovery (Hold down Command+R at startup) and then using Utilities > Terminal issue the following command:
csrutil disable
and then rebooting.
Normal God-like power will now be restored to root and you're free to delete Apple bloatware. To re-enable SIPS, the corresponding command from recovery is:
csrutil enable
However - and it's a big "However!" - with SIPS re-enabled again, OSX will silently restore any system apps you deleted. I found this out when I disabled SIPS, removed iTunes, re-enabled SIPS and found iTunes back in my Applications folder a few days later.
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NOTE: the following only works if System Integrity Protection (SIP) is disabled. Follow the steps here to disable SIP.
You can delete them, but this isn't recommended - and they'll get restored with the next update. Finder will inform you that "(application).app is required for OS X and should not be deleted".
If you're insistent on deletion, run the following command from Terminal:
rm -rf /path/to/application
substituting /path/to/application with the path to the application you'd like to delete.
Instead of deleting these applications, however, I would recommend copying them elsewhere first in case you ever need them again. Alternatively, renaming them from Application.app to something like Application.app.disabled should work as well, and your system should treat them as "not there".
perhapsmaybeharry
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1El Capitan and later won't let you just rm the default apps, they're protected. – grg Jun 04 '16 at 10:46
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@grgarside right... My answer assumed SIP was disabled. I'll correct it – perhapsmaybeharry Jun 04 '16 at 11:03
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Three downvotes are a bit much, but it's definitely worth mentioning that. – grg Jun 04 '16 at 11:05
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@grgarside edited to include renaming and the possibility of requiring these applications in the future. Thanks for pointing this out – perhapsmaybeharry Jun 04 '16 at 11:09