P: Unintended Deletion of Photos

I cannot believe that this safety-relevant problem hasn't been fixed yet.

Hi all, my girlfriend is a professional photographer and I am a senior software developer with strong UX background. We store all our data on a NAS. Our current PC and infrastructure environment setup using Windows for the workstations doesn't support recycle bin functionality on NAS network drives.
Yesterday my GF accidentally ran into this issue described here. She accidentally marked all photos instead of the one she wanted to delete and came to that second confirmation screen. As she realized she marked all photos instead of the one she wanted to remove, she used the mouse pointer to press the "X" (close window button in the top right corner) of that confirmation window - which technically is the same as pressing ESC. This permanently deleted all 185 RAW photos - a whole shooting gone.
Now I am with Markus and say: every UX designer claims ESC to cancel an action, regardless how the button implementation logic works in that window! If the button implementation says otherwise, the buttons need to be swapped.
A good UX design is always centered around the user and his experience with the product, and it does explicitly not care about technical details.
Fortunately my girlfriend has a nerd by her side who was able to rescue most of the RAW images from the SD cards she used during the shooting 😉 In other cases this issue might have fatal results, though.
Honestly I am rather shocked this is still an issue three years after it came up here. Please take this feedback seriously, file a defect for this and change the dialog behavior in one of the next Software updates.

Although I understand why it was done how it was done, I have to admit Markus has a completely valid point..

If you look at the way the dialog is constructed the [Cancel] button has focus meaning the [Enter] key would apply "Cancel" not the [Esc] To delete permanently, you would have to [Tab] to [Delete Permanently] and then hit [Enter]

If memory serves in Windows standards, [Esc] cancels the dialog unless cancel is the default (or focused) behavior.

Thanks a lot for your comments! In my opinion, pressing "permanently delete files" should be the only possible way to delete the file irrecoverably. No one would expect the file being lost forever when pressing ESC.

Got it - thanks.

Indeed the true "Cancel" button is "Permanently Delete Files", which is the same as clicking the red 'X', or pressing escape.

But note: this dialog should NOT come up when you choose "Remove from catalog..", but rather when you choose "Delete from disk..", and then only if it can't be put in the "Recycle Bin".

Although I think it was done intentionally by the programmer (you have to go out of your way to reverse the sense of those buttons like that), from a user perspective, I'm inclined to agree that it could (should) be considered a bug - I suspect the programmer wasn't thinking about the users who use escape key or red 'X' to dismiss..

~R.

As I already mentioned in my previous post, the dialog only appears if the volume does not support a recycle bin.

Just my opinion but I don't see a bug here. If you hit permanently delete, it does, if you hit cancel it doesn't. You chose to do something else.

The way I see it, you specifically told Lightroom:

1. Delete This
2. Yes, Delete this - don't just remove from catalog
3. Then when it asks you a third time, you don't take the offered cancel button but rather hope an Esc will bail you out.

But, as I have never included in a Lightroom catalog a file which is on a drive that doesn't support a Recycling processing, I cannot verify the behavior but it doesn't surprise me.

A more accurate title of your thread would be "Pressing Esc in Delete Dialog for Drives without Recycling bin causes Delete" Hopefully an engineer will chime in here but I am not hopefully it will be considered a bug.