Wondering how to delete unedited photos in Lightroom? If you are like me, you have thousands of unedited images filling up your Lightroom Library and the storage space on your laptop. Luckily the process of finding and deleting unedited images in Lightroom takes just a couple of minutes!
You will want to learn how to delete the unedited photos in Lightroom because eventually you will start running out of storage space on your computer. Since image files (especially RAW image files) take up a considerable amount of storage space, finding and deleting the unedited images is a quick and effective way of making space on your drive.
How to Delete Unedited Photos in Lightroom Step 1:
Make a new Smart Collection. Go to Collections, hit the plus sign, and select Create Smart Collection.
How to Delete Unedited Photos in Lightroom Step 2:
A new dialogue box will open. Name your Smart Collection. I recommend naming it Unedited Images. If you want, you can specify a location for your smart collection. Next, click on Rating and use the drop down box to select Develop, and then Has Adjustments. The next drop down will default to Is True. Change it to Is False.
If you want to focus on removing RAW files you can also add the setting. To do that, click on the plus sign in the dialogue box. Then click on Rating, and then select File Name / File Type and select File Type. Then select is and Raw from the next drop downs.
How to Delete Unedited Photos in Lightroom Step 3:
You can’t delete directly from a Smart Collection so select the images in the Smart Collection and give them a Color Label. To do this, select all, and then right click, select Set Color Label and pick a color label that you are not currently using – this is very important since you will be using that color label to select and delete images.
How to Delete Unedited Photos in Lightroom Step 4:
Next exit out of the Smart Collection, but going to the left sidebar and clicking All Photographs under Catalog.
How to Delete Unedited Photos in Lightroom 5:
Use the Library Filter menu bar at the top of the screen to pick Attribute, Color Label.
How to Delete Unedited Photos in Lightroom Step 6:
Select all and click delete. A dialogue box will pop up and select Delete from Disk. You have now removed the images from Lightroom and moved them to your trashcan.
How to Delete Unedited Photos in Lightroom Step 7:
This step is the most important. Empty the Trash on Finder to remove the images from your computer.
You can keep this Smart Collection in your Lightroom Library, this way going forward it will automatically collect your unedited images and you can skip to step Step 4 to remove unedited images from your computer.