# Scary Permanently Delete Message?



## CameraCarl (Oct 16, 2018)

I am trying to free up space on my iPad. I have quite a number of images on the iPad which were added through the Camera Roll, were subsequently synched to my home computer, and are stored on my hard drives at home. I no longer need or want these images on my iPad, or for the matter, in the Adobe Cloud.  So I thought it would be easy enough to delete them from the iPad. When I select them and touch the trash can icon, a scary pop up box appears which says:

_PERMANENTLY DELETE (in red, even!)
Deleting these photos is not undoable, They will be deleted from:
Your Lightroom Photos
All Synched devices
All albums and shared galleries._

_(Wow!)_

Naturally, I canceled out of the operation....   So if I were to touch "delete" do the images on my home hard drive get deleted?   I thought that images shown on the Lightroom App on an iPad were only smart images (or something like that) and had no affect on the original images stored on may hard drive. So if I can't delete the images from my iPad in this way, then how can I do so?


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## mikebore (Oct 16, 2018)

I think this thread covers the issue:

Deleting photos on mobile device without removing elsewhere


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## johnbeardy (Oct 16, 2018)

The key thing that you say is that the images "were subsequently synched to my home computer" but you don't say if that is in the "Lightroom CC" app or in Lightroom "Classic".

If it's in Lightroom CC, "Permanently Delete" means "Permanently Delete". I am surprised that Adobe didn't implement a trash system when they released LRCC or since then. So you are right to cancel and reconsider.

If you're using Lightroom Classic, you can breath more easily. What's important in the message is those lines saying photos will be deleted from Your Lightroom Photos (ie photos synced to Adobe's servers),  from All Synched devices (ie Lr Mobile or  LRCC), and All albums and shared galleries (at least I don't have to clarify that).  So in this case deletion is affecting only the synced  aspects, while your originals remain on your computer and recorded in Classic. Deletion is safe in this case.


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## CameraCarl (Oct 16, 2018)

Thanks. I do have Lightroom Classic CC on my home computer and am not using the cloud based Lightroom CC except for my iPad.  I was a bit worried when the pop-up message said things would be deleted from "all synched devices" since photos from my device's Camera Roll were indeed synched through the cloud to my home computer; so one could impute that the home computer was a "synched device."


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## Jim Wilde (Oct 16, 2018)

Yes, we've pointed out to Adobe the confusion that the existing message can cause, but it obviously hasn't been changed yet. In Adobe terms, LR Classic is not a "full member" of the cloud ecosystem, so it's not included within the scope of the message. So:

1. Deleting an image from any of the LRCC cloud apps will *not* delete the image from Classic, even if it was synced. What that deletion will do in Classic, however, is "unsync" the image and if the image was in a synced collection it will be removed from the collection when it's "unsynced" (because a non-synced image can't be in a synced collection). Membership of non-synced collections would be unaffected.
2. Deleting a synced image from Classic (or even just "unsyncing" it) will delete that image from the cloud, and thus from the LRCC apps. I tend to work from the Classic end when I'm culling synced images, i.e. if I cull in LRCC I'll simply flag the image as a reject there, then later I'll delete rejected images from Classic, which cleans up both Classic and LRCC at the same time.


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