Lightroom Classic does not delete RAW files from hard disk

[Steven Springsteel]

Recently I culled a huge library of photos and did my standard "Delete Rejected Photos" under the "Photo" options menu. It got rid of the rejects from the library, but didn't delete them off my portable drive like previous versions did. Is this a new bug?

Now I have over a thousand photos that I would need to sort through on my drive to manually delete. 

I have a more recent version on my Laptop of LRC, and an older one on my PC. The PC deletes the files properly as originally described.

Any help would be great!

[GoldingD]

I assume that the following confirmation dialog showed up and you selected Delete, correct?

[Steven Springsteel]

It did in older versions. Now it does not.

[GoldingD]

Go to Lightroom Classic Preferences > General tab, towards the bottom there should be an option to Reset all warning Dialogs click on the option.

[Steven Springsteel]

I tried this, but it doesn't work. I see there is an update available, so I'll try that tonight and see if it resolves the issue.

[Steven Springsteel]

Just updated LrC and it still shows the same prompt to just "Remove from Library." I clicked yes, and my drive still shows the RAW files, so they are removed from the collection, but not deleted. It's pretty aggravating that "Delete Rejected Photos" no longer will "DELETE."

[GoldingD]

An additional inquiry.

Those files that do not get deleted, are any of them shown as missing in LrC?

[Steven Springsteel]

"Delete Rejected Files" just removes them from the catalog, so It's no longer viewable in LrC. The actual RAW file is on my hard drive still.

[William38199261ghxs]

I've got he same problem - sure would love a solution

Bill Troutmaster

[William38199261ghxs]

the reset suggested above did not do the trick

[Beeumen]

For me, it was the 'type of import' that seemed to be the problem. When I use 'add', the delete function does work again. If I used copy, it didn't.

[Rob_Cullen]

If you imported files that were already on a hard-drive using [Copy], then of course, you would then have two copies of every image on the drive.  [Delete from disk] will then only remove the one 'copy' that it has referenced in the catalog.

The Import [Add] option does not create copies.

[Steven Springsteel]

That's interesting, because I figured there was only one way to import and it was by hittin the Import button and then flowing in the files. So I'm pretty sure with how I brought in files only one way, it wouldn't be the issue. 

As I just mentioned too, I'm curious if it was a bug in the version I used back in June. The latest version doesn't have this problem anymore for me. 

[Beeumen]

Same issue here, pretty annoying and leaves me with thousands of unwanted RAW's...

[Steven Springsteel]

I recently reinstalled LrC on my laptop. It's the latest version, and lo and behold, it asks to truly delete the files. So I'm not sure if it's a bug in the version I had back in June.

A workaround I figured out though was anything I flagged for deletion, I simply ran an attribute filter to seek out anything with the "X" Flag. From there, I selected those photos and renamed the files with the word "DELETE" in the beginning so they would be easily found in the explorer window in my folders. It's an annoying extra step, but it's the quickest way to manually delete files from the hard drive.