Cannot move to trash

[Captured Moments]

Hi All,

I'm trying to delete a number of photos and I will get a message that reads:Could not be moved to trash." Has anyone experience this issue? How could I resolve it? Thanks.

 

[clee01l]

Welcome to the forum. It is a system warning message and not a message of failure. The images are located either on a volume that does not support the Trash (i.e. the volume is not formatted as HFS+) or there is not enough free space on the volume to hold all of the files that you are attempting to move to the .Trashes folder. OS X is telling you that you can continue with the delete process and the files will be deleted (really deleted), BUT you will not be able to later recover these files from Trash.

 

[Captured Moments]

Thanks for your reply, Cletus D. Lee. Do you have any recommendations to work around this issue?

 

[Johan Elzenga]

The question is what happens. If the images cannot be moved to the trash because they are on a volume that doesn't support trash, then you will not need a work around. They will be deleted just like you wanted, except they cannot be recovered.

If they do not disappear from Lightroom, then there is another issue. Perhaps the images are locked, for example. Or you do not have the correct privileges to move them out of their folder.

So are they deleted from Lightoom in spite of that warning, or can't they be deleted at all?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

There's one other possibility. Lightroom has occasionally had problems sending things to the trash, and if that odd bug is the cause, the solution is to create an empty folder in Finder and trash it - and then Lightroom magically manages to send photos to the trash again.

 

[Captured Moments]

There's one other possibility. Lightroom has occasionally had problems sending things to the trash, and if that odd bug is the cause, the solution is to create an empty folder in Finder and trash it - and then Lightroom magically manages to send photos to the trash again.

Thanks Victoria. I will give it a try.

 

[Captured Moments]

The question is what happens. If the images cannot be moved to the trash because they are on a volume that doesn't support trash, then you will not need a work around. They will be deleted just like you wanted, except they cannot be recovered.

If they do not disappear from Lightroom, then there is another issue. Perhaps the images are locked, for example. Or you do not have the correct privileges to move them out of their folder.

So are they deleted from Lightoom in spite of that warning, or can't they be deleted at all?

No, they are not deleted from Lightroom. Lightroom is where the message reads: "cannot move to trash."

 

[clee01l]

Thanks for your reply, Cletus D. Lee. Do you have any recommendations to work around this issue?

There are three other things that can cause this OS X message. Check for these conditions:

• Is the file locked?
• Do you have correct permissions to modify the file?
• Does the file or volume have special characters?

Use Finder to check the files for these conditions. (i.e. can you move the image file to trash from Finder? What does "Get Info" tell you about the files permissions?
If none of those issues are present, the message that you receive in LR should give you an option to delete anyway and the file will be deleted rather than moved to trash.

 

[Ian.B]

my silly LR5 often leaves one file behind when I do a large delete and says "xyz file could not be deleted". But when I click the buttons again the file disappears. Never understood that little bug

 

[RogerB]

my silly LR5 often leaves one file behind when I do a large delete and says "xyz file could not be deleted". But when I click the buttons again the file disappears. Never understood that little bug

That's most likely because some other process on your computer has a lock of some kind on the file at the moment you try to delete it. Do you for example have backup software that runs in the background? It's obviously not a good idea for a file to be modified whilst it's being backed-up, so the backup software will have a lock on the file which it releases once the backup is complete, so your next attempt at deleting will be successful. I'm sure there could be other background processes that would have the same effect.

 

[Ian.B]

That's most likely because some other process on your computer has a lock of some kind on the file at the moment you try to delete it. Do you for example have backup software that runs in the background? It's obviously not a good idea for a file to be modified whilst it's being backed-up, so the backup software will have a lock on the file which it releases once the backup is complete, so your next attempt at deleting will be successful. I'm sure there could be other background processes that would have the same effect.

Thanks Roger; backup? What's that . No, no b/up software running and often it can be an unedited raw file, but mostly the first file in the list to be deleted. Not a big drama, just LR being LR.
Thanks for the thoughts