Exporting to external drives via lightroom can cause 'cannot delete file' 'access is denied' error

Report · Jul 02, 2018

I've had this happen twice now (different systems, plenty of ram, not gpu related, not cpu related, did I miss something that gets blamed?). Only posting this as I've found a somewhat lame workaround and figured it was worth sharing in case others do google searches looking for solutions and are unable to find them. I'm not looking for adobe assistance as I doubt this will get fixed, and will just get blamed on user error, or the hard drive, or gremlins. It's not, but I don't have much faith in the devs after proving their highlight/shadow tools can cause flicker issues in aperture locked, unflickering raw image sequences for time lapse in previous email discussions. They just blame it on the raw file. Which is hilarious and untrue as I've had to create my own workaround by utilizing the gradient tools and selectively altering images that way when working with image sequences for time lapse. Anyway, not the topic here.

Issue: Sometimes when exporting large sized and multiple image sequences to external drives lightroom will just straight up lock up and crash which causes the last image being exported to become an unreadable/corrupt file that can not be deleted. This can cause all sorts of issues when trying to access the drive with the corrupted image file. Btw, Lighroom hates running image exports when youtube is open...as hilarious as that is. So it's probably youtube's fault...although it did not crash, lightroom did.

Solution: The only way I was able to fix this was by using the command prompt chkdsk /f function. After which I had to install IObit Unlocker (I use 1.9.2). This allowed removal of the corrupted jpeg.

Problem solved except now there are bad sectors on my external hard drive. Hope this helps anyone else unfortunate enough to work with massive amounts of images and the inevitable issues lightroom will cause you because of this. I'm actually afraid to export large quantities of image sequences to my system drive now as who knows what madness that will cause if something were to go wrong with lightroom.