My LR Classic is taking up 200 gb of storage on my computer!

Question

Hi thereI have many tens of thousands of images in my various LR Classic catalogs and everything is stored locally on my Macbook Pro M3 hard drive. In total it's taking up over 200 gb of space, most of which is backups and previews. I try to only keep the most recent backup of each catalog but I think the previews are an issue and I need to delete some to free up space. Is there an easy or sensible way to do this? I really only need to keep the previews for the current and recent projects I'm working on. How do I find and delete (or make smaller?) the previews for older folders? And then what happens if I want to go back and edit images from one of those older folders - will it then just recreate the previews at that point?Note that I don't use smart previews as I shoot wildlife and often have to check for details and sharpness at 100%. But it could be good to swap the older previews for smart previews now to free up space?Thanks for your help!

dj_paige · Accepted Answer

In addition to what @AxelMatt said, you need to move the backups to some other drive. Backups absolutely do not belong on the same disk drive as your originals, these are not really backups on the same drive as your originals (why? because if the drive fails, then you have no copies of your photos and no copies of your catalog file).

You also should move the photos off of the internal HD to an external HD. Complete instructions are here (see Part 2 — Updating Folder Location).

AxelMatt · Answer

You've various possibilities in the catalog preferences to manage the preview size. You can LR let delete previews older then 30 days (it's the default setting) or after one day or week. Alternatively, you can also limit the size.

More infos you'll find here: How to create and manage catalogs in Photoshop Lightroom Classic

A deleted preview will be regenerated if needed.

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