Help with external hard drive

I am having trouble deleting pictures from my external hard drive. I have a Seagate External hard drive.
I have copies of a lot of the same picture; some as many as 25. I have started trying to remove the pictures. I click on the pictures and delete them. They go to the recycle bin and I also delete the pictures from the recycle bin. When I go back to the hard drive the pictures I deleted are still there. If I try to do anything with these pictures I am told they are no longer on the hard drive and I am still stuck with a lot of pictures. I don't know why I am having so much trouble. Is there a way that pictures can be removed from an external hard drive? I thought I was doing it correctly but it looks like I am not.


I appreciate any help. Thank you.

Hello Carole67,

How do you view the files on the External Hard Drive? Do you mean you see something that is displayed on the Recent Items in Start Menu? Or do you mean Picture Libraries in Windows Explorer? Or do you have some other method for accessing the Picture Folders?

Carole67 said:

Hi iko22...Thanks for replying


I am doing a project. When I first started it I was an amateur so I kept using the same picture and every time I used the same picture a copy of it would be duplicated in my external hard drive hence I have a copy of the same picture...some times 25 of the same picture. I started cleaning out my external hard drive. What I was doing was deleting all duplicate pictures which wound up in trash of my computer. So I though I deleted pictures and then deleted them from my trash..so the 25 duplicate pictures should now be 0 pictures. However, the duplicate pictures (all the 25) were back in my external hard drive. I could not do anything about this as the computer advised me that the pictures were already deleted. So now I still have the 25 pictures in my external hard drive that will always stay there forever, but I can't use them or get rid of them. iko22 if you understand what I am saying I will be surprised since I know how I ramble. I do thank you for any suggestions.

Okay, I got that you deleted 25 pictures from the external hard drive, and then deleted these same files from the recycle bin.
So I am asking, are you using Windows Explorer to see the contents of the External Drive? Or are you using something else, Lightroom for example?