Deleting Rejected Photos

[tom1979]

Evening all, I recently got around to sorting out my catalog of around 65,000 images and after spending the day going through them found around 12,500 to delete which I set as "rejected".  Things like photos of the back garden, test shots of the living room clock etc!

They are now deleted, but there is no additional space on the external drive they were on.  Presumably they are still there and Lightroom has only deleted from the Catalog.  Any ideas why that might me?  Defeats the object really.  Plus what can I do now - as I have no way of finding all those finds on the drive!

It did say it was going to put all those files in the recycle bin but it hasn't.  I am using Lightroom CC and selected delete all rejected images from "All photographs"

Many thanks!

[tom1979]

Does anyone have any insight into this?

[Rob_Cullen]

Your method looks correct and would be expected to work.

ie. Flag as 'Rejected' ,  press Ctrl+Backspace, choose [Delete from Disk].

Is it possible you had two copies of these files in your system? Maybe the 'Deleted' files were on an internal drive and the 'copies' remain on the External. Or the OS prevented deleting to the Recycle bin (beyond my knowledge!)

as I have no way of finding all those finds on the drive!

One method might be- Import all files from the external drive, select 'new' files (ie. those not currently in the Catalog), set method to "Add" (NOT copy or move), set previews to 'Minimal' (for speed of import) .

Immediately after import has completed (prepare to wait for 12500 files!), select the {Previous Import} list in the Catalog panel, review the images (CAUTION: there could be photos you do NOT want to delete!), and decide again to "Delete from Disk".

Within the {Previous Import} list you may not even need to flag "Rejected", simply select and [Delete from disk].

Try this method with a small selection of images to understand the method.

[tom1979]

Good morning and thanks for your reply.  It would appear the files were just removed from the lightroom catalog and remain on the disk.  he whole point of the exercise was to free up space so even if there were multiple copies of a file some extra disk space would have been noticed.

The exercise was in preparation to moving all image files to a server.  I will try your suggestion it does sound workable!

Many thanks,

Tom.

[99jon]

The nuclear option is to select thumbnails in the Library grid and press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Delete (Cmd+Optn+Shift+Delete - MacOS)

There are no warnings. Photos will be gone from the catalog and placed in the recycle bin/trash.

[tom1979]

Thanks, this worked fine.  I would have replied sooner but the site wouldn't let me!