I made a Mac app for syncing deleted photos between Lightroom and an external hard drive

I don't care for rejected photos taking up space on my external hard drive. The way I got around this before was re-syncing my cloud library with LR classic, then deleting the rejects from there. But LR classic is slow and buggy. After a recent experience where I couldn't open Classic at all, I decided to come up with a solution.

I didn't code this app myself. I got help from a guy on Fiver. Here's the workflow from the beginning.

• Copy Photos from SD Card (I use dropbox to do it automatically)
• Use Bridge to delete obvious rejects
• Import the rest to Lightroom cloud
• Copy the keepers onto an external HD, "Photos" (you can skip this step if you import directly to your local photo libary)
• When pruning the cloud library, mark rejects but don't immediately delete them
• Every couple weeks, filter library by rejected
• Export rejects (small jpg, 10% quality) to a folder on mac HD (mine is called "TO DELETE")
• Open the app, "Delete Rejects"
• It will prompt you first to select a source folder ("TO DELETE") and then an external HD ("PHOTOS")
• The app will then run and compare filenames between the source folder and the hard drive. When it finds a match, it will move the file from the external HD to the trash. Suffixes are ignored, so a .jpg will match with its RAW equivalent on the external.
• After the app is done running, move the contents of the "TO DELETE" folder to the trash. Empty trash.
• Delete rejects in LR.

It looks like a lot of steps but it's simple once you try it. Definitely more efficient than looping back to LR Classic, which I have now uninstalled.

The app may take a while to run if you have a bunch of photos. It goes quicker if you sort your photos by year and pick a smaller target than the root folder of your External HD.

It's important that your source folder is not on your External HD!

Here's the app: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nka1qcjzlugpdn7/Delete%20Rejects.zip?dl=0