Today’s Question: As a follow-up to the question about removing images from the Lightroom Classic catalog, you said that “in this case” [removing a derivative image from the catalog] you would remove the photo from the catalog rather than deleting from the disk. Isn’t it better to always choose the option to remove from the catalog but not delete from the disk just in case you later realize it was a mistake?
Tim’s Quick Answer: If you are removing a photo from the Lightroom Classic catalog because you feel it is not a good image, then I recommend deleting the source file. If you’re not comfortable deleting a photo, then in my view you shouldn’t remove it from the Lightroom Classic catalog.
More Detail: Yesterday’s question related to wanting to remove derivative images from the Lightroom Classic catalog, while keeping the source photo the derivative was based on in the catalog. In this circumstance I think it makes sense to remove the derivative image from the catalog since it will be managed as part of a separate project outside of Lightroom Classic.
When the photo in question is an original capture rather than a derivative created for a particular project, I don’t recommend removing the photo from the catalog unless you are also going to delete the source file. From my perspective, if you are using Lightroom Classic to manage your photos and you remove a photo from the catalog, you effectively will no longer know that the photo exists. In other words, the photo is taking up space on your hard drive, but you won’t see the image in Lightroom Classic.
In other words, removing photos from the catalog without deleting the source file can lead to a situation where you have clutter in your folders with extra hard drive space being used up, and where you are not aware of those images because they aren’t in your catalog.
For these reasons I suggest only removing original photos from your Lightroom Classic catalog if you consider them outtakes that you won’t ever put to use. In that case, I recommend deleting the source files from the hard drive as part of the process for removing the images from the catalog, which means clicking the “Delete from Disk” button in the confirmation dialog after choosing to remove a photo from the catalog.
If you’re not comfortable deleting the source file, I recommend keeping the image in your catalog, and marking it in some way so you know it is an outtake. For example, you could mark such outtakes with a reject flag in Lightroom Classic, and as appropriate set a filter so you’re only seeing the images you didn’t reject. You could then later decide to delete those rejected photos, for example.
