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Participant
May 9, 2023
Question

Saving files in Lightroom and computer

  • May 9, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 490 views

Hey,

 

This might be a really stupid question, but I feel I have to ask as I've just started properly using Lightroom.

 

Q: Do I need to have all of the photos I add to my Lightroom albums saved on my computers harddrive as well? Or can I delete them from my harddrive after adding them to my Lightroom albums?

 

As I don't own an external harddrive yet, and my computer has two small ssd's I'm in trouble now.

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Jim Wilde
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 10, 2023

Treat yourself to an external hard drive (which are incredibly low cost these days) and set the Lightroom preferences to store your originals on that external drive. Otherwise you'll find youself spending so much time trying to manage the space on your two small internal drives.

selondon
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 10, 2023

Lightroom Desktop will store the images in the Cloud, not on your computer. Once syncing to the Cloud is complete then they can be deleted from the computer (although it's always worth keeping a back up somewhere).

 

However, even though Lightroom stores photos in the Cloud, it does keep some locally also within its cache (recent imports and edits etc)

 

If you have a small SSD it may be worth reducing the size of this cache in the Preferences:

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/lightroom-cc/using/preferences.html#:~:text=Adjust%20preferences%20in%20Lightroom,required%20preferences%20and%20click%20Done.