Catalog size getting huge when importing Pixel 4a portrait pictures

Question

I have an issue when importing pictures from my Google Pixel 4a into Lightroom Classic v11 (Macos): the portrait images (jpg format) cause the size of the catalog file (.lrcat) to increase much more than expected. In average, each newly imported portrait image increases the catalog size by more than 1MB (whereas I have other catalogs with tens of thousands of pictures for which the total size of the catalog does not exceed a few hundreds MB). May it be related to the depth maps embedded in those pictures? (which by the way don't seem to be recognized by Lightroom, unfortunately...)

johnrellis · Answer

With those sample pics, I observed similar increases in catalog size: 1.51 MB / photo was added to the .lrcat file, a 27% overhead in total disk space used by .jpgs. For comparison, importing regular JPEGs adds about 5 - 8K per photo to the catalog.

Poking around, the increase comes from the XMP metadata added by the camera that LR stores in the catalog in its entirety. Almost all the bytes of that metadata are consumed by two encoded JPEGs:

- a 2688 x 2016 full-color reduced-resolution preview of the full image (about 1.3 MB)

- a JPEG 2688 x 2016 monochrome JPEG that is the actual depth map (about 0.23 MB, see below).

I don't know why the full-color preview is included in that Google metadata. I skimmed Google's developer docs and other random posts about Pixel depth data and couldn't learn anything. The actual depth map is relatively small, about 0.23 MB.

Maybe if Adobe decides to support Google depth maps, LR would then store the Pixel metadata more efficiently.

You could post a feature request asking that LR support Pixel depth maps.

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