using lightroom 5 to delete unwanted photos

Forum|Forum|12 years ago
October 12, 2013
3 replies
17716 views

I have LR5 locating photos on each hard drive.

I know how to select and import INTO Lightroom

What I would like is to be able to delete the images I don't want from with Lightroom.

Is this possible?

Also a Best Practices question:

Should I put all photos on a server and have one catalog on it that all computers point to? Seems to be best to consolidate, but don't know if that's the most efficient way to do it.

Thanks

This topic has been closed for replies.

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peterh12213088

Participant

Hi,

I was having an issue with this. I just found in Library mode you can bulk reject all images in one folder. Its a super fast way to remove from Lightroom from and disk. I went into grid view and did select all. Then pressed the X key and all images now show as being rejected (marked with the little X in the flag). Now you can go into photo and select "delete rejected photos" to delete all the images. Obviously the step is final so needs to be used with care. Im just a hobbyist so my images don't matter that much. If you keep family images or are a pro then you need use this procedure with extreme caution. You can then go to the folder to delete that by right clicking and selecting to remove. Now all done and dusted in a few clicks.

JP Hess

Inspiring

I'm not sure why you consider this to be an "issue" with Lightroom. What you described is precisely how Lightroom is supposed to work. As with any process of deleting images from your computer, you need to pay attention to what you are doing. Images deleted using Lightroom go to the trash can or the recycle bin, so they can be recovered if necessary and imported again. It's just that it will then be necessary to redo any adjustments that were made on those images because once they are deleted from Lightroom all history for those images is erased and cannot be recovered unless you have a backup of your catalog that you want to restore.

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peterh12213088

Participant

Actually, I just checked. They don't go in the trash, least not on my Macbook air. So they could potentially be lost altogether. Also just because software is meant to do something doesn't always mean everyone will know every aspect of it. Surely thats what these forums are for; to help people make the best of the software and share knowledge and help each other. Your post is misleading because if someone follows it and expects to find their images in the trash, they could be badly disappointed.

JP Hess

Inspiring

Another approach is to go through your images, and when one that you want to delete is the highlighted file, you can type the letter "X" and that will mark that image as being rejected. After you have gone through a batch of images you can press Ctrl (or Cmd - Mac) + backspace and all images that have been rejected will be displayed. Then you can choose to remove or delete all the images at once.

Geoff the kiwi

Community Expert

To delete just select the files you want to get rid of (in Library Grid is probably easiest) and use the delete key. You will get a message asking whether you want to just remove them from the catalog (leaving on disk) or delete from disk (to trash) choose carefully here!!

Catalogs cannot be on network disks but image files can.

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