Participating Frequently

Question

Deleting images in Lightroom 2020 Classic

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
December 4, 2020
4 replies
1056 views

The following applies to use of Lightroom Classic 2020 on a Mac.

I sometimes have to delete large numbers of image when they are redundant.

I select the 'Delete from Disk' option to free up space on the HD, but although the files disappear from Lightroom and are not visible in Finder, the space they occupied is not recovered, and they don't appear in the Mac trash bin.

I can recover the space by the following:

Close Lightroom

Use 'Spotlight' to access 'Disk Utility'

Run 'First Aid' on the disk on which the images were located.

The deleted files will now appear in the Trash and emptying the Trash will recover the disk space.

Is there a better way, or there a setting in Lightroom that I have missed, or is this a bug.

Thanks

Ian

This topic has been closed for replies.

P

Pamela21881149hmt0

Participant

THANK YOU!!!! This worked for me. Out of the blue today I couldn't delete files from LR. Very odd, but this fixed it.

kentdesign

Community Expert

Glad it did.

Can you please tell us WHAT specifically worked for you?

J

Jao vdL

Community Expert

When using external drives, one thing to make sure is that you reformat them before use to be hfs+ (or APFS if these are SSDs). Anything else is asking for trouble. Not sure if this is related to your issue but thought I'd mention it as most external drives come formatted in a windows format, usually NTFS and you need a third party driver to be able to write to those disks.

I use an external RAID with Classic on my Mac and I have never seen this issue. Don't often delete images though so I might have missed it.

kentdesign

Community Expert

I too use an external RAID with SoftRaid software from OWC for my image storage. I have deleted images in the past with no problems. And yes, making sure the drive is formatted correctly in the first place does seem very important.

ithrelkeldAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi KD,

Yes, the drives are all Mac OS Extended. So I guess it's not the issue.

Thanks

Ian

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Being unable to delete files in the normal way makes me wonder if there is a file access permissions issue on removable volumes. If you are running one of the most recent versions of macOS where Apple tightened file security (I think that’s macOS 10.15 and macOS 11), it’s worth making sure that Lightroom Classic has been given access to any types of volumes where you store images or the catalog:

It’s probably a good idea to give it Full Disk Access as shown below on the left, so that it will have no problem working with images and settings files from any location.
In Files and Folders as shown below on the right, at least make sure that it’s given access to Removable Volumes, since that applies to all of your external drives.

I’m not sure if that’s the solution, but it’s a good thing to try.

ithrelkeldAuthor

Participating Frequently

Ah, Conrad, I think you are right.

I just checked my permissions and they are not as shown.

I am in the process of reinstalling it, now, to see if that fixes the issue.

Thank you.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Just Shoot Me

Legend

I do not think this has anything to do with LrC.

It is something in the OS or a problem with the drive the image files are located on that is causing this to happen.

AFAIK there is No system In LrC that takes control of what files are moved to the Trash system of OS X. It is OS X that handles this.

ithrelkeldAuthor

Participating Frequently

But it only appears to happen in Lightroom.

Anything I delete through 'Finder' or through other applications such as 'Word' goes straight to the Trash.

Another quirk is that if I have deleted things through Lightroom, that are not showing in trash, but then I use 'Right click - show in Finder, within Lightroom. Then delete any file. All the missing files appear in Trash too.

Perhaps Lightroom's 'Delete from Disk' is not flagging correctly with the operating system so the deleted files are left in Limbo until located by some other procedure

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