Today’s Question: In Lightroom Classic is there a way to reject a group of photos, so that I can delete them from Lightroom and the hard drive? I have lots of junk photos just wasting space.
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can very easily apply a Reject flag to multiple photos in the Library view in Lightroom Classic, and then quickly delete all rejected photos in a given folder or other location.
More Detail: The Reject flag in Lightroom Classic can be very helpful for deleting outtakes with an efficient workflow. While this approach adds an additional step compared to simply selecting and deleting photos, that extra step also provides an additional opportunity to make sure you really want to delete the applicable photos.
The first step is to mark photos that you’d ultimately like to delete with a Reject flag. This can be done with a batch of photos in the Grid view (thumbnails) display in the Library module. You can select multiple images at a time to make this process easier.
To select a range of images that are all in a sequence, click on the thumbnail for the first image and then hold the Shift key on the keyboard and click on the thumbnail for the last image in the sequence. To select images that are not in a sequence you can hold the Ctrl key on Windows or the Command key on Macintosh while clicking on the thumbnail for each photo you want to add to the selection.
After selecting multiple photos within the Grid view display, you can press the “X” key on the keyboard to assign a Reject flag to all of the selected images.
Once you’re finished reviewing a group of photos you can easily delete all images to which you have assigned the Reject flag. First, navigate to the location where you want to delete all photos that have a Reject flag. That could be a single folder, for example, or you could even go to the All Photographs collection in the Catalog section of the left panel in the Library module if you want to delete all photos with a Reject flag in your entire Lightroom Classic catalog.
Finally, go to the menu and choose Photo > Delete Rejected Photos. In the confirmation dialog that appears, click the “Delete from Disk” button so the images with the Reject flag with be both removed from the catalog and deleted from your hard drive.