Lightroom using to much hard drive space

Since Smart Previews from those Raws would be only 5 MP (5% of original) well compressed Dngs, if you rendered them their share of the disc space would be next to insignificant. I think more relevant questions are whether you are also rendering 1:1 previews (which would be huge) and what is the size of the .lrcat catalog file (which I would expect to be not much over 10 MB for a mere 300 images)?

ndwgolf1  wrote I just started a new lightroom classic catalog and saved it to the creative cloud. Before I started importing photos I had 119 GB of free space on my Mac Book Pro. After importing around 300 images and also creating smart previews my hard drive has dropped to 11 GB and fluctuating between 11 and 12 GB.......whats going on? I was under the impression that the smart previews were stored in the cloud not on my hard drive. Thanks Neil

If you are using LR Classic, and not Lightroom (the New name for the Cloud Centric version, No CC at the end) then building Smart Previews never get uploaded to the clouds. Smart Previews are stored on you hard drive in a subfolder called CatalogName Smart Previews.lrdata under the same folder the catalog is stored in. Smart preview can take up a lot of space as they are, IIRC, reduced in size and compressed DNG files equaling about 1.5MBs each. But even with smart preview for those 300 images should not take up 100 GBs.

Then you have the images themselves. How large are these images.

The only time Smart previews are stored in the Adobe Cloud system is if you Sync collections with the Adobe mobile and web system and even then the smart previews you create on your computer are not used. New, other, smart preview are created and uploaded.

I have no idea what Apple's iCloud has to do with this as unless you specifically setup iCloud to copy your LR catalog and images. No Adobe software uses the Apple cloud system.

Smart previews have nothing to do with this. If importing 300 images takes up about 100 GB of disk space, then something else is going on. No camera produces raw images of 33 GB each, and the Lightroom catalog also does not take that much space, even if you render 1:1 previews and smart previews as well. I think it's more likely that some backup software is creating a temporary cache. I have seen Carbon Copy Cloner do this and Apple Time Machine can also make a temporary backup to a cache if the backup disk is unavailable.

So it sounds like you are shooting in a raw format?

The size of the sensor can contribute pretty quickly to file size and hence storage issues: I believe you can choose to over-ride the embedded preview in the Preferences settings so its worth a look there as to what you may have set.

Hi Neil,

I am assuming you are using LR Classic because you have also mentioned that you saved it to creative cloud. Any particular reason you saved it to creative cloud?

Also when you say you imported 300 images where are those images present? Were they already present on the disk which you imported into LR? Hope while importing you didn't accidentally choose "Copy" option in LR which would made a copy of the images into the selected folder.

Smart previews are stored on the disk only but they will not be bigger than the actual images itself. Hence they will not be contributing to this problem. Smart previews are sent to the cloud also only when you turn on Sync.

Thanks