I'm afraid to delete any of these files collected over 10 years. Is there any way to know?

Question

Files collect with Lightroom over the years. I don't know why Lightroom doesn't clean up after itself but I tried deleting once and wound up with an awful mess. What do the experts recommend? Just leave them? Seems to be the safest. This screen shot is only a small fraction of all of the lightroom files that have collected through the years. I only have one catalog of files over several disks. I don't want to destroy my catalog which is working beautifully now. Any recommendations?

D Fosse · Accepted Answer

Here's the set of files belonging to one LrC catalog.

The essential one is the catalog file itself, obviously. The others are there just to speed things up. You can delete them, they will get rebuilt as needed - but it will take some time and things will move a bit slower until they're completely recreated.

And then there's the backups (zip). They should be stored elsewhere, having backups in the same place as the original sort of defeats the purpose. You only need to keep one backup as long as you know it's good.

Look at the version numbers on your files. Anything v12 is no longer needed.

D Fosse · Answer

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