Finding and deleting photos (from disk) not in an album

[Fredrik266205518dxt]

I recently realized that my workflow has caused me to build storage beyond what I want.

I use the LR app on a Mac and when I upload from my camera, I first import all photos to an album that I have called "Temp", which is where I review all photos and delete the ones I don't want before I move them into a designated album where I keep them longer or permanently. I shoot a lot of sports for my kids' teams and share with other players/parents but after a few weeks, and as I add new games, I delete older ones.

Or... at least I thought I did.

I have been doing this for some time and I only recently saw that the total photos count in my LR app is 40K+ while the sum total of all my albums content is only some 5K. So, in fact there are 35K pics that I don't want but that are still stored on my computer and only visible in the "All photos" folder.

I did some reading on this forum and seem to understand that the only way to actually totally delete the photo (also from disk) is by doing so from the "All photos" album. This leaves me with a big problem, since I have no idea which of the 40K+ photos in the "All photos" album are the ones I want to delete! I don't want to touch the ones that are actually in an album.

Is there no way to locate "orphan photos" that don't belong to an album and delete them specifically? Is there a way to filter out or in any other way isolate the photos that I had already deleted (or so I thought) and get permanently rid of them?

Would really appreciate some help here...

[anmurark · Accepted solution]

If you type "Album:" in the search bar at the top, you should see a dropdown with a list of all the albums in your library. At the bottom of the list should be entry that says "Not in any album". Selecting that should show all the photos/videos that are not part of any album.

[Fredrik266205518dxt]

Thanks for answering quickly anmurark. I tried that now, but it doesn't seem to work. I do get a partial list of the albums I have, but not all of them are listed. Neither do I see an entry "Not in any album". I will play around a bit by merging albums to see if it works when I have fewer / a less complex folder and album structure. Any other suggestions?

[Fredrik266205518dxt · Accepted solution]

Now I found it! When I press the search field, there is an option under "meta data" that says Album, and once I press that, I can see Not in any album. Problem solved. Thanks!