How can I sort by corrupted/unreadable files so I can delete?

Question

I have recently had a bad hard drive and many files were corrupted (100,000 +). When I view them in Lightroom they have a black "i" in the top right corner and a warning that LR can't read the file and won't be able to make adjustments. So I want to delete the files as they are now useless but taking up massive storage space. If LR can identify these files then I should be able to sort by them, select them and remove from catalog. They are all sprinkled randomly throughout a very large catalog and amny folders are filled with a random mix of corrupted files and good files together. How can I do this??

johnrellis · Accepted Answer

I do not know of a way to sort or filter photos in Lightroom Classic so that the corrupted ones are separated from the un-corrupted ones.

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Method 1:

1. In the Library Filter bar, select Metadata, and then change the first column to filter on Metadata Status. Select Unknown.

2. In the Library Filter bar, click Attribute, and then on the far right of the bar, click the Photo icon and the Virtual Copy icon, but not the Video icon (filtering out videos).

This will identify many (perhaps most) corrupted files, but sometimes not all of them. It won't identify corrupted videos, because LR never finished implementing video metadata.

Method 2:

See here for a method using Export that takes longer but is more likely to identify every corrupt photo:

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/threads/validating-all-your-cataloged-photos-and-videos-for-corruption.51433/#post-1342930

When it completes, you'll get the ability to save the list of corrupted files in a text file:

If you have many such files, you can then use the Any Filter plugin to search for all those files by pasting the list of corrupted file paths into this query:

dj_paige · Answer

Can you restore all the photos in bulk from their backups? If so, that would seem to be a better solution (assuming the backups are not corrupted, they shouldn't be corrupted, but you never know)

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