How can I fully delete unseen photos in Lightroom?

[ldegroot]

I always assign 1 to 5 stars for my desired Lightroom Classic photos, and I then erase the undesirable ones which have zero stars.  Unfortunately I did not realize that those zero photos remained on Lightroom when they became invisible sinze they are not deleted from Lightroom altogether.  I now can no longer see these erased photos so I have no way of erasing them.  But I now somehow need to clear those missing zero photos totally from Lightroom. 

How can I do that please, Please, PLEASE?  Many thanks!!! 

[JohanElzenga]

How do you know they are still in Lightroom when you say they are invisible? There is no such thing as an invisible photo in Lightroom. You can filter photos so that certain photos are not shown, or you can remove photos from a collection so they are not shown in that collection, but every photo that is in the Lightroom catalog will show in 'All Photographs' providing you do not activate any filter.

[ldegroot]

Thanks for your help! I will try to be more clear.

I meant that the unwanted affected photos are still in Lightroom as you
suggest, but they do not show in my Lightroom photos for me currently. I
need to make them reappear for me in Lightroom so that I can then see them
and can properly delete those photos from Lightroom altogether: those which
I no longer want to have.

Are you able to show me please what steps I need to go through so that I
can totally evaporate those unwanted photos?

Is that any more clear?

Many thanks for your help!

--
Leo

This email was created from recycled electrons.

[JohanElzenga]

It was already clear. Like I already said: if you select the 'All Photographs' collection in the upper left panel and you do not have any active filters, then Lightroom will show all the photographs that are in the catalog. No exceptions. If your unwanted photos still do not show, then they have already been removed from the catalog (but not necessarily also from your hard drive, if that is what you meant).

[Per Berntsen]

When you delete an image in LrC, you have two options, Remove from Lightroom, and Delete from disk.

If you used the Remove option, the reference to the image was removed from the catalog, and LrC no longer knows about the image, but it remains on disk.

If you later want to delete that image from disk, you have to use the File explorer.

Note that images are not "in" Lightroom, they are just referenced by the catalog. The images you see on the screen are previews created by Lightroom.

[ldegroot]

Thanks for your assistance!

When I goofed with my Lightroom photos I erased the unwanted ones but that did not remove them from Lightroom apparently.  But I should instead have deleted them completely from Lightroom.   

As you mention, I do want to delete those unwanted photos. (But I do not know about the disk.)  For that you mention me needing to use the File explorer to correct this.  Could you explain please how I could do that?  I looked at the Lightroom File heading as you suggest but did not see how I could activated it.

Thanks again for your help!

Leo

[D Fosse]

You're apparently still missing the point: The photos aren't in the Lightroom catalog. They are physically stored on disk, irrespective of Lightroom or its catalog. If you uninstall Lightroom and delete the Lightroom catalog, your images will still be there stored on your disk.

The Lightroom catalog is just a reference, a set of pointers to disk locations, and a set of text instructions for how to process the images. You can delete this reference by removing the image from the catalog. But it will still be on disk.

[Sean McCormack]

Further on from that, the only way you'll access them from Lightroom again is to add them back in, either using Import or Synchronize Folder. If you use Import, they'll all be visible in the Previous Import collection when it completes and you can delete them from there.