A grave mistake. I thought the catalog was just a collection of the photo information and not the photos themselves. I wanted to remove some folders and learned it removed them from my hard drive. I wish when one selects to remove an album there would be a warning that it will be removed from the hard drive! Lightroom gives the option of removing from the catalog or removing it from the PC. Fortunately my photos are backed up, but still extra work to reinstall the camera photo folders.
On my PC I have a Pictures directory with many sub folders. Several of the sub folders are different cameras I have used. Then I have lots of other photos such as scanned photos and photos sent to me. I wanted to remove the camera photos because these are not kept on my PC, but an external hard drive with the exception of the current year. The other photos are on the PC and the external hard drive. Changes that I make in the photos in XnView need to be saved the the photos. I wanted the other photos on the PC to be separate from the camera photos to make it easier to save changes done in XnView.
On another note, I wish there was an updated manual similar to the Beginners Manual by Roger Carter as some things have changed in the current version of XnView. Maybe there is one and I just have not found it.
Deleted My Whole Camera Collection
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