Removing deleted photos from hard drive in Lightroom, not Lightroom Classic

Question

I'm frustrated by the fact that after I delete photos from Lightroom it doesn't appear to delete those files from my hard drive. All of the faqs on this online point to Lightroom Classic to do this. I don't understand why Lightroom Classic would have this functionality but Lightroom doesn't. Can someone clarify what I'm doing wrong?

Windows 11 - Lightroom 6.5

Rikk Flohr_Photography · Answer

The short answer is it is likely there is nothing to delete...

Lightroom Desktop adds your images to the catalog and then syncs them to the cloud. After this, the files are then purged from your local drive as time and system resources allow. Unless you've specifically marked a folder as "Store Locally, there are likely only light-weight previews residing on your machine. So, when you delete an item from your catalog, it goes into a special place called "Deleted", where it is held for 60 days and then purged or can be purged, by you manually. In any case, the photo, whether in "Deleted" or hard purged by you, is not really a large original but rather a collection of low-resolution previews.

Unless you've marked large numbers of folders "Store Locally", there is no significant space to really recover.

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