LR for Mac storage location for Previews.

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
September 25, 2024
5 replies
542 views

I have a Mac Studio M1 running Sonoma and several external SSDs.

I am in the process of leaving LR Classic and using LR for Mac exclusively. I have dragged across all my photos from Classic to albums in LRfM so that I now have all my edited originals in the Adobe cloud (635GB) as well as originals in an external SSD.

I am dismayed to find that previews are kept in the PICTURES folder in Lightroom Library.lrlibrary. This is now running at 250GB. I simply do not have enough room on my home drive for this! Yet LRfM does not give me any options to keep this library on an external SSD! How can I force LRfM to allow me to keep previews externally, since without this option I will be unable to add any new photos at all.

Files and libraries

This topic has been closed for replies.

selondon

Community Expert

@Darrall What are you settings in Preferences / Cache?

Have you got Smart Previews stored locally and can you reduce your Cache limit?

Nadeem28230335k4xr

Known Participant

Your library seems way too big. I have all my images in the cloud as well (though its only about 150GB worth). My Lightroom library is only 2.5GB.

M

marie_6853

Participant

I had a similar issue with my setup—my SSDs are maxed out, and it got to the point where managing space became a full-time job. I found a post about how to manage disk space on a Mac, which was super helpful for getting things under control.

M

marie_6853

Participant

Also, guys, you can check it out here: https://www.iboostup.com/blog/managing_mac_storage – it gave me a few tips on cleaning up system files without messing things up. I also moved a bunch of my photos to an external SSD, but for some reason, Lightroom didn’t give me an easy way to move the previews.

Ian Lyons

Community Expert

@Darrall

I've moved your post to the Lightroom Ecosystem forum as you're more likely to get an answer therer than in the Lightroom Classic forum.

kglad

Community Expert

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

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