Today’s Question: If you delete a photo [in Lightroom Classic] while not having an external hard drive connected, when you reconnect the drive will the file be deleted? In other words, can you cull images when the drive is not connected or do you need to just reject and delete later?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can only delete photos when the source files are available. If you try to delete when an external drive is disconnected, for example, your only option will be to remove the photo from the catalog, and it won’t be deleted from the hard drive even when the drive is reconnected.
More Detail: One of the advantages of the catalog used by Lightroom Classic to manage photos is that as long as you’ve generated previews for photos you can browse them even when the source files aren’t available. For example, you can review photos and update metadata even when an external hard drive containing those photos is not connected to the computer.
However, you can’t delete photos from an external hard drive that isn’t connected. In fact, if you attempt to delete a photo that isn’t available by using the Remove Photo command, your only option is to remove the photo, not delete it from the hard drive.
If you remove a photo from Lightroom Classic without deleting the source file, that file will still be on your hard drive taking up space, even though the image won’t be included in your Lightroom Classic catalog.
This issue is among several reasons I recommend assigning a Reject flag to photos you want to delete, rather than deleting them directly. You can then review the rejected photos, and then delete them when you’re sure you want to permanently remove them and that the source files are available. So, in the context of today’s, I would assign a Reject flag when reviewing the photos to identify those I want to delete. Then, when the external hard drive is connected and I’m sure I want to permanently delete the photos, the Delete Rejected Photos command (found on the Photo menu) can be used to delete only the rejected photos in the current folder location. Note that you then want to click the “Delete from Disk” button in the confirmation dialog so the source files are deleted and the images are removed from the Lightroom Classic catalog.
