Greyed out files

[Evil Piggy]

There are 180 greyed out files (JPG, PNG, MOV, HEIC) in my Download folder. All are zero bytes with no preview. All appeared Sept 1 at 1:27AM. I did not create or put these files on my MacBook! It's a new MacBook Pro and I've never used or downloaded most of these file formats.

When I try to delete them, I get the following:
"Some of the items you are moving are in use by another application. Moving them can cause problems with the application. Are you sure you want to move these items?"

A couple of people suggested that they were from an incomplete iPhone transfer and safe to delete, but no iPhone (or any other device) has ever been connected to this computer. (Certainly not at 1:27AM.) I currently do not use an iPhone and I'm the only user of this Mac.
Where did they come from?
Is it safe to delete them anyway?

 

[Slartibart]

you can try to delete them from the terminal.

• open a terminal window
• change to the Download folder by typing (or copy&paste from here):

cd ~/Downloads/

• if there are no other JPGs, PNGs, HEICs, MOVs and MPG4s in the directory, you can use

ls *.JPG

• to list all JPEGs in the folder. Check wether these are the files you want to remove. Then use

sudo rm *.JPG

(you will ask to enter the password for the current user) to delete e.g. all JPGs from downloads (sudo rm *.JPG *.PNG *.heic *.mov *.mp4 will remove all files of these file types.) Only administrator users can use sudo. If you’re not logged in as an administrator, please follow this description.

EDIT: depending of your knowledge of terminal/shell commands there are more elegant solutions, e.g. this one.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

Shut down the Mac, all the way off.
Then, reboot.
Now try deleting the files.
Any difference?

 

[bobcomer]

I had this happen when a copy files got aborted because of a LAN error. If I remember correctly, what Fishrrman said was what worked for me in the end to delete them.