Silly question... I just switched to mac not too long ago, so I am still getting acclimated with things.

On my PC my recycle bin only held a certain amount of info... not too much. I couldn't fit an entire wedding in the trash bin at one time. So basically, I just don't worry about my trash bin. I don't ever empty it, because it only holds so much. When I dump in something new, the older stuff gets permanently deleted.

On my Mac, it seams that the trash bin is endless. I have dumped a lot of RAW files in there... and they are still there. Do I need to empty this periodically? I don't want to fill up my computer hard drive with all the RAW files in my Trash bin. Example, At a wedding I can shoot about 1800 RAW files (20 gigs?) and I think they are still all in my trash bin.

Hey Kari, yes, you need to empty it. The files aren't deleted from the computers hard drive until it's emptied so they are still taking up space. It could probably slow your machine down too if you have a lot of big files in it.

I usually empty it after I put stuff in it.

Oh yeah... Trash Bin on a Mac can quickly, easily, eat up all of your harddrive space!
I didn't realize that at first, and one day, I cleared like 700GB off of my harddrive, just by emptying the trash! Ack!

If you want to really remove the files and make them unrecoverable you can opt to go to Finder>Secure Empty Trash, and your files will be overwritten with meaningless data. This option does take a long time if there is much in there.

Haha, this made me laugh.

But yeah, it can definitely hold a gargantuous amount of "garbage".
I make it a habit to empty it each day.

I like it empty.

Thanks guys... off to empty my trash!

PLEASE make sure you have backups.