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Participant
November 23, 2007
Answered

Lightroom WONT delete photos from disk

  • November 23, 2007
  • 62 replies
  • 65600 views
I understand the diffrencce between deleting a photo from LR verses completely deleting from the disk.

However when I try to "delete a photo from disk" through light room it remains on my disk no matter what i do.

I do click the option "delete from disk" verses "remove" from LR

any ideas on what is happening here?
    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer _David_Jacobs_
    Yes, I was tagging photos and had selected a collection with a specific tag. When I go back to folders all is well. Thank you.

    62 replies

    Participant
    December 7, 2008
    Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Delete; well I'm sorry to say this nor any of the other solutions or recommendations are working for me. This problem has been giving me a fit for a week. Running LR 2.1, Vista Ultimate and everything else I need with negative results. Does anyone have a solution or a recommendation for a better program that might work? I'm having the same problems with Elements 7 where I can only delete from the catalog but not from the drive or disk. All I can say is this is so frustrating. And yes everything runs as Administrator.

    TIA
    G Rob
    Participant
    December 4, 2008
    THANK YOU MATT!!

    FINALLY a solution to my problem...no more transfering rejected photos to a special "to be deleted" folder!!!

    Merry Christmas

    Kevin
    Participant
    November 26, 2008
    THANKS MATT!!

    I didn't have to search all morning for a solution to delete photos from my disk. The solution you so conveniently posted worked like a charm!

    Bug or no, not being able to readily delete photos from my disk and not just the catalog is definitly a flaw...

    Thanks again Matt for doing the legwork for me.

    - Darlene
    Participant
    November 21, 2008
    OK, I just spent a half hour searching for whatever John may have been talking about and by chance actually found something on page 6 within the countless threads regarding deleting photos on this forum that actually helped me. I have no idea if it is what John was referring to, and I can't stress enough how much I don't care.

    Thankfully for anyone else out there with this problem who might stumble across this, I am going to directly post the solution, right here, right now, in this very thread, in the hopes that I will at some point save someone (or even several people! wouldn't that be cool?) a half hour of their lives.

    Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Delete does the trick for me with LR 2.1. The photos are truly gone, out of the catalog, and out of the file on the disk for good, even after a synch.

    I repeat: a program that tells you it will delete photos from disk and does not do so has a bug. A stupid one.

    -Matt
    November 21, 2008
    Good on ya, Matt.

    Most folk here answering questions are unpaid, overworked, underloved, over hassled, under.... well, only the first is true for all of us. I had confidence that you would and could do your own search after the, um, tip.
    Participant
    November 21, 2008
    Umm, thanks for the link err I mean tip, John. I'll go search now.

    -Matt
    November 21, 2008
    There's no bug on this: Most of us are perfectly able to delete images from disk without any trouble.

    There is a concurrent thread with various pointers; please see it.
    Participant
    November 21, 2008
    Hi,

    To permanently delete a file in Lightroom 2.x I've found it's necessary to first select "Delete photos" with a right-click of the mouse. Simply hitting the delete key will bring up the exact same menu which gives you the option of (supposedly) permanently deleting from disk or simply removing from the catalog. Unfortunately, the files are only ever really removed from the disk if you access this dialog box via the right mouse button - hitting delete on the keyboard will not permanently delete anything. They'll come back from the dead like zombies if you synch the folder, and if you look at the actual file in the OS they were never really gone in the first place. :(

    What a stupid bug.

    -Matt
    jbm007
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 13, 2008
    Find the folder where the inages are.

    Right click on the folder.

    Check properties\ security and make sure you have permision to change things in the folder.

    You may have have a permission setting that does not allow you full control over the folder, even if you are running under adminstraive mode.
    Participant
    October 13, 2008
    I am having the same issue of files being deleted from LR but not the hard drive. I tried running under administrator mode and deleting.

    The file was still there and appeared again when I synchronized the folder.

    HELP!

    Win Vista Home Premium
    4 drives under RAID 5 totaling 1 TB
    4GB RAM
    Quad Core