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Home / Chromebook / How to Delete Files and Images on a Chromebook

Delete Images and Other Files

You can delete images and other files on a Chromebook by right-clicking and choose Delete. You can also use the keyboard shortcut ALT + BACKSPACE.

Keyboard shortcut to delete files on Chromebook

Delete images on Chromebook

Unable to delete images and videos? Try this

Did you find photos read-only on your Chromebook? Turns out, you can go to the original file location and delete them.

I made a video to show you how to find and delete files

Browsing through Google's official Chromebook forum where I have started contributing more these days, I noticed a people saying "unable to delete images".

All those questions on the forum have been answered by the amazing community members, but I am taking a minute here to explain to all my friends here.

Read-only Audio, Images and Videos

The Chrome OS Files app, the built-in file manager, shows three different sections called Audio, Images, and Videos which show content from all the sources you have on your Chromebook.

Let's take the Images section as an example. This will show all the images on your Chromebook regardless of their folder. These are read-only files. Your Chromebook might have some images in the Downloads folder and some in your Play Files folder where Android apps keep their files. You will see all of them here.

Double-click and open the picture. From there, you can click the pencil icon to edit the image. You can copy the file, use "Get info" to see additional details about the file. If you click "More actions", you will see all the apps from your Chromebook that can do something using the image (Gmail to send it via image, LightRoom to edit it, etc). You can even right-click an image and set it as a wallpaper.

You cannot, however, delete tor rename the image from here. The delete option will be disabled or grayed out. The reason is, this is just a "view" and not a folder. You will need to go the original folder where the image is saved in, to delete or rename the file.

The same is applicable to the Audio and Video sections too. So, next time you find an image in the Images section that you want to delete or rename, find the folder where it is saved in, and you are good.

How to Delete Images

You now know that you cannot delete files from the recent section. However, after you find out the location of the file, how do you delete it?

You can either right-click and select Delete, or use the keyboard shortcut ALT + BACKSPACE. Give this a try and let us know how it goes.

Questions? Let us know in the comments section.

Content Strategist and Digital Minimalist. Loves testing new Chromebook features and writing about them. Favorite Chrome OS Channel is Canary. | Twitter