Two LIGHTROOM Questions

about question number 1 i have about 4000+ photos in my hard drive now and my .lrdata is about 3.something GB you do the math if you have more than what i have. :)

about number 2 i actually want to know that one too. have no idea..

Thank Paolo.

Regarding question 1, I keep all of my photos on external drives, but “Lightroom Catalog Previews.lrdata” remains on my mac’s internal drive, and I could really use the 22 GB that it is taking up. I’m just looking for a way to decrease that file’s size.

Anymore thoughts from others on these two questions?

I regularly delete my lightroom backups, all except the last two in case one is corrupt, which has happened, but as i have a daily backup drive of my machine, all is good.

Lance, is this anything to do with your catalogue settings? A thought: if you have chosen large size previews which are never discarded, perhaps this would explain the size of your catalogue. I would check in File -> Catalogue settings…

David gets the cigar. Clear em out after a week or month dependant on your workflow.
22GB – that’s insane!

i’ve several catologs and the dimensions there are about 1-3 GB
for reportage or wedding i made one catalog per work and discard the preview after 30 days

if you want one all-inclusive catalog to make easy the research of metadata, you can import all sub-catalogs in one catalog wuthout preview (discard after 1 days) to have a small dimension catalog

yes, i erase old catalogs backups and store only last two backups

Hey Lance, one thing I do to remove the need for backups (and therefore save space) is to regularly write out all the metadata to the files. That way if your catalog ever gets corrupted, all your edits and captioning are already saved to the photo or xmp file so you won’t lose them. It’s something you should do anyways to make sure your edits/captions stay with the photo if you open it in Bridge, send it out to an editor, etc… You can lose your previews if the catalog goes bad but I’m not worried about them, you can just have the computer rebuild them and let it run overnight.

Do you also have missing photos in your library? If so, remove those from the catalog.