P: Deleted photos not being deleted in Lightroom

[Rhapsodys Blues]

Using the most recent version/update in Lightroom. For several days I have been avidly deleting photos to make room. Thousands of photos deleted. I have rarely seen the blue pop-up stating so. Almost none of the deleted photos have been even though they were initially darkened as if they were being deleted. Three full days of deleting and they are all still there. Complete waste of my time. 

[Theresa J]

Can you share screen captures? Do you see the images you have tried to delete when you view your Lightroom cloud with a browser at lightroom.adobe.com? Have you tried deleting images in the browser?

[Rhapsodys Blues]

I just heard from a fellow photographer and they are also having this issue. I didn't screenshot no and all the photos are back where they were originally. I don't open Adobe in a browser, I could try that if that's a viable solution? Any photographs I try to delete, come right back/won't delete. This is ongoing! Thanks so much! 

[Theresa J]

Screenshots help us see what you see. And, yes the browser view may be a viable solution. What you see, or don't see in the browser tells us what is actually in the cloud, or not.

[Rhapsodys Blues]

Thank you! Very helpful. I'll make sure to screen cap any issues going forward and try out the browser. 

[Rhapsodys Blues]

I tried the browser option and all the photos I deleted, some several times and very recently are still there. They were shaded yesterday and earlier, stayed that way for quite some time and are now right where the originated from. 

[Theresa J]

Try deleting just one from the browser and see what happens. Also, share a screen capture.

[Rhapsodys Blues]

I deleted a photo from the browser and I believe it was deleted in Lightroom as well. What does this mean going forward? I have to delete photos from the browser from now on? It shows how much space I have left using the downloaded Lightroom app, so I have to delete the thousands of photos all over again? There's a major issue every week. I'm really losing my patience with all the time I've wasted just trying to use this program. 

[Theresa J]

I don't know why it's not working in the Lightroom app. It should work the same as the browser.

Perhaps you could try deleting fewer images at a time in the app. Make sure they move to the deleted folder before you quit out of the application, or before you delete more.

To completely delete images, you also need to delete them from the deleted folder.

I don't understand why you are having to delete so many images. 

[Rhapsodys Blues]

Thanks for weighing in Theresa, very appreciated. I was able to delete from the browser and see that they are deleted in the app. It didn't matter how many images at a time I deleted, a few or a hundred. I didn't delete thousands at a time. Usually 50 to 100 or so at a time. It takes a long time to delete thousands that way. I take a lot of photographs on continuous shooting so after a time they add up and you run out of space to store them. Clearly I need to find a different place to store them more efficiently so it doesn't take up all my time. Exporting is very slow. Thanks again for all your suggestions. Clearly I'm not the only one experiencing this and it shouldn't be happening. 

[Theresa J]

Sounds like you would be better of using Lightroom Classic. It stores images on hard drives, not the cloud, and it has more features than Lightroom. However there is a bit of a learning curve with Lightroom Classic.

[PeterB2]

We'd like to understand better why this issue is happening  to you and others.  It would be very helpful if you could do the following:

- Delete several photos

- Wait for some time

- If the photos still stay there, select the darkened photos and then capture the diagnostic log with the following steps:

Go to Preferences

Account Section

Hold down the [Opt/Alt] key to make [Diagnostic Log] button appear and select it

When you have your log ready, direct message me via the forum.

Hopefully  this will help us figure out why this is happening.

It does seem that some deletes are working based on what we see on the server.  If that's not the case, let us know as well.

Thanks,

Peter

[Rhapsodys Blues]

Thank you kindly Peter for your reply. When an issue like this comes up and recently they are frequent I just can't drop everything to "fix" them. One person I know having this issue won't even report it anywhere because it's too time consuming and complicated. I have to agree. I am not causing this issue. I've never seen it happen before. I'm going to consider my options and other programs. Going through this so often is making photography not so much fun. I'll revisit and do these steps if I am able. Thank you.

[PeterB2]

Yes, totally understood.  This is not a problem that we can reproduce ourselves and we've seen a few people struggle with so just hoping to get more info here so we can hopefully address.  Appreciate if you can take the time, but totally understand if you can't.

-Peter

[Rhapsodys Blues]

I've seen two more people add to the tweet I shared about this issue having the same problem. I shared it with Adobe Care yesterday and in DM's and not one reply/response. Thanks again. 

[Rhapsodys Blues]

I'm seeing success/improvement. Photos are deleting consistently for a short time anyway from the cloud. Crossing fingers. 

[james treacletart]

@PeterB2 I am encountering a potentially disastrous variation on this problem. I too am running short of space (~20 GB remaining out of 100 GB) so I have started exporting images (many of which have been edited) and saving them on my NAS drives, folder by folder. However, two days ago I discovered that around 60% of all my images from a range of other folders had been moved to the "deleted" folder with 59 days remaining. I selected the "restore" option for all of them, and it is taking more than 48 hours for the restoration to be completed. The real question is how these photos came to be deleted in the first instance, and next, why does it take so long for them to be restored!  The photos were not from any of the folders I have deleted myself. Thankfully I have backups so I don't think anything has been lost permanently, but this incident has shaken my confidence in Lightroom!  If this thread is closed I will repost to a new thread.

[PeterB2]

@james treacletart Sorry  to hear you having problems with accidental deletes.  The most common cause of this issue is accidentally selecting additional files when you are performing deletes.   I see deletions in your account coming from Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and Mobile and occurring in large numbers in the last week so it's hard to isolate the issue.  I can only suggest that you  keep a close eye on what is selected at the time of deletion and do a check of the deleted files afterwards.  If you can find a specific case where it looks like extra files are deleted,  please private message me the details and we can look into it further.

-Peter

[james treacletart]

@PeterB2  Thank you for responding quickly. I completely understand and will monitor this issue. However, in the meantime I encountered another apparent Lightroom failure which I have tried to document in detail so you can follow up next week. Like others I now have to start exporting and deleting my Lightroom folders to avoid the 100 GB limit. I use a cross section of Adobe Apps (including Premiere, Acrobat etc.). There's a big monthly cost increase if I go for a plan with increased storage. Further, I don't want to commit to an exclusively Adobe storage plan so I need to export my photos to a cheaper cloud storage provider. Further, cleaning up 1 TB of storage would be far more challenging than cleaning up 100 GB. That's my motivation.
So I started the process of exporting and deleting images. Most of my recent images came from my iPhone, and some from my digital SLR. Many of the newer folders have scanned negatives and slides dating back decades.

The first dozen or so folders worked as expected. Then I started exporting a folder containing a mix of mp4 videos and jpg images imported from WhatsApp on my phone. The export function worked for the videos, but stopped part-way through exporting the images. I restarted my laptop, and the image export went further but still stopped before completing the export. So I documented what I could and it is in the attached document from MS Word - the images remain uncompressed to avoid losing detail. To help you track down this problem, I will try and avoid using Lightroom for anything except for image viewing for a few days.

[PeterB2]

Can you please try to repro the export issue and when it is happening, create a diagnostic log as follows:

Go to Preferences

Account Section

Hold down the [Opt/Alt] key to make [Diagnostic Log] button appear.

You can then private message me with the log.

This will help us figure out what is going on.

Thanks,

Peter

[james treacletart]

Thank you, Peter. I repeated the same steps and was unable to reproduce the problem. However, now I know what to do if the problem recurs. Thank you for your prompt assistance.

[james treacletart]

@PeterB2 

Peter, I don't know if this is how I send a direct message. Let me know if I should do it differently.

I have encountered a different failure exporting images: some of the images exported were not the images that I requested to be exported and images that I had deleted a few minutes earlier were substituted for the images I expected. The attached MS Word file shows screen shots. I have also attached the diagnostic log as requested. Let me know what to do next .... Oh dear. The file browser would not allow me to attach the log file. Error message The file type (.html) is not supported. Valid file types are: 8bf, abf, abr, act, aep, afm, ai, arw, as, ase, avi, bmp, book, cel, cfc, chproj, cptx, cr2, cr3, crf, crw, css, csv, dn, dng, doc, docx, eps, epub, exif, fbx, fla, flac, flv, fm, gif, icma, icml, ico, ics, idml, indd, jpeg, jpg, jsfl, json, log, loss, lrcat, lrtemplate, m4a, mif, mov, mp3, mp4, mpg, nef, nrw, obj, odt, orf, otc, otf, pdf, pfb, pfm, pmd, png, ppj, ppt, pptx, prc, prel, prproj, ps, psb, psd, raf, raw, rtf, sbs, sbsar, sbsm, scc, ses, sesx, skp, sol, srt, srw, ssa, stl, svg, swf, tif, ttc, ttf, txt, wav, wmv, x3f, xd, xls, xlsx, xml, xmp.  Please tell me how to send the diagnostic log file!

PS: At the first attempt to send this message, I tried to attach the diagnostic log file first. I received the error message shown above. Then I tried to attach the MS Word file, but it would not upload – even after 15 minutes of waiting. Therefore I am sending this entire message again, but not with the diagnostic log file this time.

[peter-b]

I will contact you directly via private message to follow up.

-Peter

[james treacletart]

It would be really helpful for Lightroom to be able to export multiple albums within a folder while retaining the folder structure and optionally renaming the images within each folder to retain a custom sort order. 

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Cross-matching to bug numbers - changing status