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philipn95815980
philipn95815980
Inspiring
October 25, 2017
Answered

Updated to LR Classic - do I still need the old LR Catalog?

  • October 25, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1287 views

I recently updated Lightroom to Lightroom Classic as part of the "photography" plan.

When I installed Lightroom Classic it updated my catalog and renamed the updated catalog, but the old one is still there.

So now in my Lightroom folder I see the old catalog still there ("Lightroom Catalog.lrcat") and the new one ("Lightroom Catalog-2.lrcat").

The new one is smaller in size (80.7MB) than the old one (136.1MB).

I'm wondering if I still need to keep the 'old' catalog that the old version of Lightroom used ("Lightroom Catalog.lrcat").

I ask because I want to include the Lightroom folder in my nightly backups, and it would speed things up a bit if I didn't need the old catalog.

Thanks.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer john beardsworth

Who knows? You probably won't, but let's say you find a major problem with Classic and decide to go back, or you could do something stupid like changing the rating on all your photo and need to start over again with Classic. It doesn't do harm to keep it. but providing you have backups you can delete it if you want.

2 replies

philipn95815980
philipn95815980Author
Inspiring
October 25, 2017

I think the message is to err on the side of caution, so I'll keep the old library, for the time being at least.

Thanks to everyone for the advice.

john beardsworth
Community Expert
john beardsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 25, 2017

If your backup procedure is solid, not really. But it doesn't do any harm so leave it for a while. Maybe just make it read-only via Explorer/Finder?

philipn95815980
philipn95815980Author
Inspiring
October 25, 2017

How will I ever need this old catalog in the future?

Scott Masterton
Scott Masterton
Inspiring
October 25, 2017

Well hopefully you won't ever need it but maybe in a few days or a couple of weeks or a couple of months something might come to light, like some kind of undetected bug and you find out that some of your stuff is missing and so you might need to go back to that catalog. So keep it for a few months or even longer just in case but most likely you will never need it again.

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