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Black flagged rejected images will not delete

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Robin Page

Member
Joined
Jul 6, 2016
Messages
78
Location
Port Fairy, Victoria, Australia
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
LR Classic 8.3.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.13 High Sierra
I have been working on a pick exercise and have about 500 black flagged images. Selected Photo>Delete rejected images and got the following message

An internal error has occurred. 7:0 attempt to index field 'root File' a nil value.

Does not sound good. Where do I go from here please?
 
Hi Robin,

Sorry to hear that you are having problems. Hopefully you have been diligent in making catalog backups so that you have a fall back. It could be catalog corruption or maybe a single image causing your problem.

In any case the first thing I would do is to make a new backup. Before exiting go the menu Lightroom->Catalog Settings, General tab and set the backup option to either "Every time Lightroom exits" or at a minimum "Next time Lightroom exits" . Then quit and make sure that you create a new backup. I always leave the "Test integrity" and "Optimize" options set.

This possibly could correct the condition that is causing your error. If not you will want to try to isolate the problem by deleting smaller groups. If the images that you are attempting to delete are spread over multiple folders then you can select each folder from the Folders panel and try the Cmd-DEL from there. Lightroom will then try to delete only those that are flagged with "X" within that folder.

If none of this works than you may have a corrupted catalog so contact @Victoria Bampton and request to have your catalog evaluated. Very often here secret catalog guru can work some magic and fix these problems. I think it is also useful to Adobe as they can learn more about the kinds of problems that occur to help make Lightroom more robust.

-louie
 
As you're looking through the images, look out for one that doesn't have any metadata on the thumbnail or in the Metadata panel. That's almost certainly the problem image.
 
Hi Robin,

Sorry to hear that you are having problems. Hopefully you have been diligent in making catalog backups so that you have a fall back. It could be catalog corruption or maybe a single image causing your problem.

In any case the first thing I would do is to make a new backup. Before exiting go the menu Lightroom->Catalog Settings, General tab and set the backup option to either "Every time Lightroom exits" or at a minimum "Next time Lightroom exits" . Then quit and make sure that you create a new backup. I always leave the "Test integrity" and "Optimize" options set.

This possibly could correct the condition that is causing your error. If not you will want to try to isolate the problem by deleting smaller groups. If the images that you are attempting to delete are spread over multiple folders then you can select each folder from the Folders panel and try the Cmd-DEL from there. Lightroom will then try to delete only those that are flagged with "X" within that folder.

If none of this works than you may have a corrupted catalog so contact @Victoria Bampton and request to have your catalog evaluated. Very often here secret catalog guru can work some magic and fix these problems. I think it is also useful to Adobe as they can learn more about the kinds of problems that occur to help make Lightroom more robust.

-louie
Thank you Louie. I will do that. Meanwhile I will export the current project as a Collection and create a new gallery with it. I will then try and sort out the original gallery.
 
Hi Robin,

Sorry to hear that you are having problems. Hopefully you have been diligent in making catalog backups so that you have a fall back. It could be catalog corruption or maybe a single image causing your problem.

In any case the first thing I would do is to make a new backup. Before exiting go the menu Lightroom->Catalog Settings, General tab and set the backup option to either "Every time Lightroom exits" or at a minimum "Next time Lightroom exits" . Then quit and make sure that you create a new backup. I always leave the "Test integrity" and "Optimize" options set.

This possibly could correct the condition that is causing your error. If not you will want to try to isolate the problem by deleting smaller groups. If the images that you are attempting to delete are spread over multiple folders then you can select each folder from the Folders panel and try the Cmd-DEL from there. Lightroom will then try to delete only those that are flagged with "X" within that folder.

If none of this works than you may have a corrupted catalog so contact @Victoria Bampton and request to have your catalog evaluated. Very often here secret catalog guru can work some magic and fix these problems. I think it is also useful to Adobe as they can learn more about the kinds of problems that occur to help make Lightroom more robust.

-louie
As you're looking through the images, look out for one that doesn't have any metadata on the thumbnail or in the Metadata panel. That's almost certainly the problem image.
As you're looking through the images, look out for one that doesn't have any metadata on the thumbnail or in the Metadata panel. That's almost certainly the problem image.
As you're looking through the images, look out for one that doesn't have any metadata on the thumbnail or in the Metadata panel. That's almost certainly the problem image.
Thank you Victoria. 500 images to review but I do suspect that can identify the suspect image folder which is of images from another person. My gallery is well over 100.000 images and whilst I know that they can be much bigger, perhaps keeping a gallery per year might limit damage of this sort? Robin
 
I wouldn't start splitting catalogs. If this is the issue I'm thinking of, it's purely a bug that the engineers are looking into, and would be just as likely on any catalog. An easy way to find them - make sure the Grid is in a thumbnail view that should show some metadata and look for one that's blank. Takes a minute or two.
 
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