Catalog alteration

[hansk88440039]

First of all, excuse me for maybe not describing my questiona well enough in English. I do my best.

I have my recent RAW files on PC. (Say the last 3 years) The old ones I store in the cloud and harddisks to give space on my PC. So I do not use the catalog anymore when it comes to the older years. 

But still those data remain in the catalog.

And that catalog gets bigger and bigger (it seems) till a point where I also have to start a new catalog. But than I loose the data from the current years.

Is there a way to remove the old years from the catalog but keep the years that are still on the PC?

Thank you.

[dj_paige]

Do not start new catalogs. Move the photos to an external HD or network drive while keeping the photos in the catalog. (Do not store LrC photos in "the cloud" unless it is the Adobe Cloud)

This explains how to do what you want: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/move-photos-another-hard-drive-leaving-catalog/

And this is also helpful: new photos should be imported to one of the external hard drives or network drives. Do NOT put new photos on the internal drive.

[hansk88440039]

The way I store my RAW files for 20 years now, works fine for me. All I want is to reduce the size of my catalog which is now 110 GB on my internal drive. Probably with partly data that I never use anymore. How do I do that? Thanks.

[dj_paige]

You could easily remove these photos from your LrC catalog. But you should really address the root cause rather than ignore the root cause — the root cause is you don't have enough space, and that is easily fixed, as a I have explained above, by moving the older photos to a different drive while keeping them in LrC.

[hansk88440039]

"You could easily remove these photos from your LrC catalog"

How can I do this? This was my initial question and I don't know how to do this. Thank you. 

[dj_paige]

I haven't answered that question about remove photos from the catalog, as I think it is a very poor approach, as I explained above. Better to move the photos to a different disk while keeping them in the catalog. I gave a link with instructions.

[hansk88440039]

Is there anyone who can answer my actual question please? Thank you.