Lightroom catalog/organization confusion (?)

cbay

Senior Member
Always had a hard time with stuff like this and hoping i can get some clarity as to what i have going on here.
Lots of data getting built up and need to figure out what is necessary and not. Have a new computer coming and figured this would be a good time to tackle the things i have put off for so long.
I don't know what i'm looking at with the LR file and wonder if it should be quite so large - the backup folder is 5GB, one catalog preview is 500mb and the other is nearly 2GB, the regular catalogs one is 100 meg and the other is 1.2GB.
Need to make sense of this and see if i can make this manageable. Don't know why there are two catalogs?
I'm opening a can of worms here so forgive me for not preparing better questions prior to posting my confusion...
lightroom file pic.JPG



LIghtroom image1.jpg




lr backup image.jpg
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
You can buy 1T USB 3.0 hard drives for $54... You can change the catalog preferences to save both the catalog and the catalog backups to the external drive.

You can buy 2 of them, and then daily schedule the LR drive to get backed up/mirrored to the other drive...

Catalogs have many options/settings that determine whether their size is relatively small or relatively large based on what sizes you tell LR to use for Previews and how long to keep the Previews... Same with Backups... how frequently you do them, is a setting... Daily/weekly/ etc...
 

cbay

Senior Member
Thanks, i think the frequency / time between backups was confusing me - as i was looking for catalogs based on how i structured my image folders. It looks like the the backup catalog folders for example are grouped based on the time between backups, not the way i made my photo folders.
Either way, it doesn't seem like the backups are doing me any good being in the same place as the catalogs anyway, and i have an external backup of everything,,,so it looks like i can free up some space. :)
Haven't made total sense of it yet but probably will with some time. Worse case i can delete the small sized folders to see what it removes and then go back and retrieve from my backup after i figure it out. lol
 
It also looked like you had Lightroom 5 and then upgraded at some point. You probably have not used the LR5 catalog in a long time. Look at the dates ans you will see that. You can get rid of the LE5 catalogs if it is truly a old catalog that has been upgraded.

Also on the backups they are by date and you can delete the older ones. I generally keep only the last 3 or 4 backups.
 

cbay

Senior Member
It also looked like you had Lightroom 5 and then upgraded at some point. You probably have not used the LR5 catalog in a long time. Look at the dates ans you will see that. You can get rid of the LE5 catalogs if it is truly a old catalog that has been upgraded.

Also on the backups they are by date and you can delete the older ones. I generally keep only the last 3 or 4 backups.

That would make sense for the small extra folders You mean all those backup catalogs have everything in each one of them? Oh man, i'm an idiot. lol Yeah i guess i could stand to lose a few of those. Lemme guess, the previews the same way?
 
That would make sense for the small extra folders You mean all those backup catalogs have everything in each one of them? Oh man, i'm an idiot. lol Yeah i guess i could stand to lose a few of those. Lemme guess, the previews the same way?


If I remember correctly there is a setting somewhere that will dump the previews after X amount of days. Double check but I think you do not really need the previews anyway. I think they are just for editing with the files offline. In other words you can have your files on a external drive and it does not have to be plugged in to edit. Never figured that one out since my editing computer is a desktop and everything is always plugged in.
 

cbay

Senior Member
If I remember correctly there is a setting somewhere that will dump the previews after X amount of days. Double check but I think you do not really need the previews anyway. I think they are just for editing with the files offline. In other words you can have your files on a external drive and it does not have to be plugged in to edit. Never figured that one out since my editing computer is a desktop and everything is always plugged in.

I think it's just dumping the smart previews after 30 days. I'm on satellite internet so i work offline with a stand alone copy. I'll check on the regular preview, they are almost 2GB where the smart previews folder is small which makes sense.
 

RocketCowboy

Senior Member
I think they are just for editing with the files offline. In other words you can have your files on a external drive and it does not have to be plugged in to edit.

Exactly right.

I use the smart previews so that I can edit while traveling, without needing to bring anything other than the catalog, while I home I also have access to the original raw files. After the project is completed though, it's good to dump the previews so the catalog stays small.


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