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Bob_Bateman
Participant
September 30, 2019
Question

elements 13 catalogue too large

  • September 30, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 298 views

catalogue size help.  I did a full backup, then recoverd the catalogue into a 2 terabyte drive, but the catalogue says its 1.45 TERABYTES!  why is it so large on the hard drive if it is not supposed to be storing images? if i search the size its only a few hundred gigabytes, but the 2T drive  is almost full, only 373 gigs left.   There is nothing else in the drive.  when I search teh folder, there is a folder that includes all the images, at 1.31 Terabytes, and a folder called photos, that has considerable less.  Can I safely delete the first folder that is huge??  those images are stored in a separate hard drive.

 

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    1 reply

    Greg_S.
    Community Expert
    Greg_S.Community Expert
    Community Expert
    October 1, 2019

    When you create a backup in the Organizer, it stores not only the catalog database (which is relatively small) but also all of the media contained within the catalog.  Hence, you have created a backup of all of your media, filling up your drive.

     

    If you only want to backup the catalog, simply copy the entire folder which contains the file catalog.pse13db, using Windows File Explorer (or the Mac equivalent).  If you can't find that file, go to Help>System Info . . .  which will report the location of your catalog.

    T
    TMuld
    Participant
    April 9, 2020

    Greg

     

    I have a related questions. I am using a Mac and want to backup my adobe photoshop elements 12 catalogue and photos to an external drive. Whilst I can do this it litelarrly takes hours. I suspect this is because the catalogue contains all photographs since 2006 and its huge. Each "set of pictures" are stored in a seperate folder under picy=tures and I import them intop photoshop from there since the importing directly into photoshop no longer eworks. Is there a way of "splitting the catalougr" into a number of, still useable catalogues, that would avoid this problem?

    Greg_S.
    Community Expert
    Greg_S.Community Expert
    Community Expert
    April 9, 2020

    The only way to split a catalog is to copy it (perhaps several times in your case) and delete files from the copy of the catalog so that only one of your "set of pictures" (or however you want to split it) remains in the copied catalog.

     

    I'm not sure how this will save you any time since ultimately each of the catalog's photos will have to be copied for a backup.  Yes, a large catalog takes a lot of time to save.  But after you do the first backup, you can save all newer files in an incremental backup which only saves the newer files.

     

     

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