While you’re editing, you can move images to the trash directly from within LuminarAI. This makes it easy to organize your hard drive and reduce clutter. However, as a protective measure, LuminarAI requires three steps in order to permanently delete an image.
Deleting a File in LuminarAI
To delete one image or multiple images in LuminarAI, select one or several images in the Catalog window, right-click on the image (or one of the selected images), and choose Move to Trash from the pop-up menu. Alternatively, you can press Cmd+Delete (macOS) or Ctrl+Delete (Windows). The selected images will be removed from their current folder and placed into the Trash collection in LuminarAI.
The Trash collection in LuminarAI is just a staging area. When files are in the Trash collection, they are still on your hard drive in the same place they had been. If you look in the Collections list in the Catalog panel, you’ll see a new Trash collection. If there are no files in the Trash, this collection is hidden. Click on the Trash collection to see additional controls.
Restoring Files from the Trash
When images are in the Trash collection, they’re still on your hard drive and you can easily restore them to their original locations in your Catalog.
To restore images from the Trash:
Select the image(s) you want to restore.
Choose Image > Put Back to restore the image(s) in your Catalog, or right-click on the image (or one of the selected images) and choose Put Back.
Emptying the Trash in LuminarAI
You can also permanently remove an image from the LuminarAI Catalog. When you do so:
- All references to the image in its folder are removed from LuminarAI
- All edits are removed (be sure to export a new file to disk if you want to save these first)
- Any references of the image are removed from albums
There are two ways to empty the Trash in LuminarAI.
- Right-click on a single image or on one of the multiple selected images and select Delete Forever from the pop-up menu.
- Click the Empty Trash button at the top of the Catalog window. This will send all images in the Trash collection in LuminarAI to your operating system’s Trash (macOS) or Recycle Bin (Windows).
At this point, your files are not yet deleted from your hard drive. LuminarAI has only moved your files to the operating system’s Trash (macOS) or Recycle Bin (Windows). You can still open the Trash/Recycle Bin on your computer and retrieve the files. To permanently free up disk space, be sure to empty the Trash or Recycle Bin.
Emptying the Trash/Recycle Bin
To truly delete images from your hard drive, you need to empty the Trash (macOS) or Recycle Bin (Windows) on your computer. You need to do this at the operating system level.
- macOS. Choose Finder > Empty Trash…
- Windows. Find the Recycle Bin icon on the desktop, then right-click it and choose Empty Recycle Bin.