Deleted photos are not in trash

Report · Nov 06, 2018

I see that this has come up frequently, but I can't find an answer. I have a Windows 10 pc, and am using Lightroom classic cc. Lightroom is installed on my SSD; but all my images are on external drives. When I delete edited images, they do NOT go into the trash. I read somewhere that there is a misconnect with this kind of setup. One person mentioned that there is some way to fix this. Twice now I have edited a whole folder of images, and then the question mark shows up and LR says that the image can't be found. What I think has happened is that after editing the images, I deleted the originals from which the edits were done. This is only noticeable when I go to export the edited images. How can I fix this? Thank you.

Report · Nov 06, 2018

When I delete edited images, they do NOT go into the trash.

Why are you deleting Edited Images? Can you give us more details? If you are editing images and want to export them it's unclear why you would want to delete them.

When you select an image and choose to delete from disk, the image is moved to the trash bin. You will only see the images in the trash bin when the drive is connected if the original image is on the external to begin with.

Report · Nov 07, 2018

Hello. I'm new to LR, and obviously made mistakes. But I only put my images on my external drive, and it is always connected to my PC, so that isn't the issue.

Let me go into more detail. I have my original Raw images on my external. When I imported them into LR, I gave them a different name (date, subject, original file name). It is those imported images with a new name that I edited. I spent several hours editing. But when I went to export to jpeg, the images show that the original can't be found. At one point I had double images imported, with LR giving the names of -2 (version 2) to those. In one case I deleted those version 2, because I'd edited version 1. But for a second set of images, I never had duplicates, and never deleted them, and the same thing has happened; the originals can't be found to export.

I can see all my edits in history, but can't copy them to apply to start over.

In searching the forums I found this Re: How to recover deleted photos from Lightroom? where someone wrote that: "I have had a problem with deleted images not going to Trash after upgrading to Mojave. A terrific woman with Adobe fixed it. For whatever reason my external drive was not communicating with "Trash" so she opened the drive, added a new folder "unnamed folder" and deleted it to Trash. Voila !! Images from that drive now deleted with Lightroom go to Trash as they should."

I'm just looking for help so that I don't have to re-edit my images.

Thank you.

Report · Dec 21, 2022

This is a fix. I accidentally deleted a batch of photos from disk. I had been clearing flags and neglected to unselect the whole folder when I went to delete one image. The photos were not in my trash (osx 11), lightroom 6, and all the photos were on an external SSD. So I went to the SSD, created a folder, deleted that new folder to trash, and when I went to trash all my images were there. I have to reimport them but I don't care, at least they are here!

Report · Dec 21, 2022

@Metchy

You do have recent backups of your catalog file and all of your photos, don't you? If so, no need to re-import, all of your work is still in the backup of your catalog file, you don't lose your edits or other work if the photos are in this backup.