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Hi, I‘m working on an external SSD (Crucial X9 pro, ~100GB used of 1TB) on iPad pro 11, iOS 26.2.
Moving any photo to the trash freezes the app. When selecting multiple images and moving them to the trash, some will be deleted and some won’t. Deleting items via the iOS finder app works fine. Any suggestions what I can check or any settings in iOS?Kind regards
MariusForgot to add, the SSD uses the ExFAT file system as I’m dragging photos back and forth between it and my Windows PC.
Hi, sorry to hear you are having this problem. I have not run into it myself. I created an EXFAT partition on an SSD (I did it on the Mac, fwiw). Then, I put some images into the root of the volume and inside a folder in the volume. I added both to Nitro. Then I selected images in each of the root and the folder and then used the trash icon to delete them. Both worked fine and the app continued to run without freezing.
Can you find a crash log or something that I can look at? You can find those in Settings > Privacy > Analytics > Analytics Data and search for the app.
Also, do you have problems deleting files if they reside in a folder on your iPad, rather than the external disk?
Hi Nik, I’ve sent you the log via email to support@gentlemencoders.com. I’ve tested copying photos from the external SSD to the iPad‘s internal storage via the files app and I don’t get the same problem, deleting them via Nitro works fine.
Another observation from today: sometimes when deleting just a few photos (about 5 or so), Nitro resumes after being unresponsive for a few minutes and I get the „couldn’t communicate with a helper application“ pop-up.
For other people watching this thread, Marius sent me a crash log. It appears that iOS is stuck trying to trash the item, and because Nitro calls iOS on the user interface thread, eventually iOS kills the app for have a stuck user interface. I have made a note of this issue – I cannot fix the fact that iOS is getting stuck, but I can move the trash operation off the user interface thread to avoid a hang.
Hi Nik, is there any update on this? While it seems the app is not freezing anymore when attempting to delete photos, I’m now at a point where I’ve got a folder containing roughly 770 photos of which 250 are marked as rejected. I can’t delete photos at all. Whenever I select photos and tap the trash icon most of the time nothing happens or only 1-2 of the selected photos get deleted after about a minute of waiting. Unfortunately I need to use exfat as I also need to access the SSD with a Windows PC.
Hi Marius, sorry to hear about this. I have not looked much into the trash freezing up problem, other than to review the logs.
iOS 27 has made things worse – there is no move to trash any more. Only delete. I believe what is happening to you is that the OS is stuck trying to move the files and it is waiting for some other program on the device to finish.
Thanks Nik, so I understand that this seems to be an iOS limitation when working with exFAT formatted external disks. (I’m on iPadOS 26.7). Can you think of any workaround other than backing up my SSD on a Mac and reformatting it as APFS? Is there a way to directly delete the images and bypass the .trashes folder? Or move all rejected images to a different folder which I can then delete using the files app? I’ve only got a very old MacBook that’s not my main computer and I’d want to avoid having to use it as a file system bridge.
Right now, the app always goes to the trash. iOS 27 broke the trash for apps, so the next update to the Nitro will detect that bug and ask if you want to delete the images directly. I don’t know if that will solve your problem or not, because if the OS is stuck, then it may be stuck for delete also. Perhaps the OS is busy indexing the images or something like that.
I’ve done a little experiment today to see if using APFS would improve the situation. I formatted another SSD as APFS and copied over the folder with the 700 raw images and their XMP sidecars. It felt even less responsive than the exFAT disk, indexing took longer and the move to trash behaviour was exactly the same. So on the plus side, it saves me from reformatting my main SSD as APFS, on the downside I still don’t have a solution to reliably delete rejected photos.
Sorry to hear that. As I wrote earlier, the problem is in iOS. The best I can do is to move the trash off the user interface thread so that it doesn’t hang up the app, but it’s still up to iOS to do the work properly. I can also add a delete option.
The 2026.08 update is out, so if you have iOS 27, then you should get a Delete alert in Nitro because the Move to Trash is broken on iOS 27.
Since I cannot reproduce this problem, are you willing to beta test when I have the above changes implemented?
I’d be willing to beta test, however I can’t update to iPadOS 27 as Apple has just dropped support for my first gen 11” iPad Pro and I’m stuck at 26.7.
That’s okay – you can fill out the form for beta testing. In there, if you include your App Store email address so I can sign you up for Apple’s TestFlight service, that will save a step. Scroll to the bottom of this page: https://www.gentlemencoders.com/nitro-roadmap/index.html
Hi Nik, this is slightly off-topic but as a workaround for the problem above I tried to use Adobe Bridge on my PC to delete rejected photos from said external SSD. However it seems Bridge does not recognise Nitro’s rejected flags. When I filter by star rating it works fine, but for rejected images Bridge always shows 0 photos, even though the filters in Nitro on iPad work as expected. These are all RAW files and no JPEGs. Is this expected behaviour?
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