Deleted Files (mainly ARW) Being Stored as "Other" Category Mac Storage?

[Justin26680429hfg4]

Running macOS Catalina 10.15.7

LrC -11.5 / CameraRaw -14.5

I just recently began photography as a hobby. I typically am uploading images to my LrC using standard SD card transfer and occasionally tethering directly to my macbook. All my ARW photos are stored in one large folder with many subfolders based on the date of the photos taken. I am backing up very consistently to an external drive and deleting from disk any ARW files that I do not want to keep locally. Upon purging unwanted ARW files, I also empty trash.

I noticed that this is really not mitigating any storage issues, as it *seems* that the deleted ARW files, categorized as "Documents" in mac storage are being somehow converted to the "Other" category in mac storage analysis, which is a bit more of a grey area in terms of what file types they are. But I say *seems* because I can only possibly correlate these deleted ARWs being somehow stored elsewhere on my local disk, even if I've deleted them completely from LrC and seemingly any other visible folder. [see attached screenshot]

The ARWs that I am keeping locally for the time being seem to add up in terms of the "documents" disk space consumed but I am extremely confused by the "Other" category, which is taking up more than half of my 1TB local hard drive at this point. If anyone has any ideas why this might be happening, would appreciate some advice and insight about how to fix this. Thank you in advance!

[Jao vdL]

This happens when you delete files and you are not letting your Mac make TimeMachine backups in the mean time. The other category will shrink if you allow a backup to be made. So check your time machine preferences.

[Justin26680429hfg4]

I ran a pretty massive backup to an external drive but the "Other" portion does not seem to be decreasing at all. If anything it makes small increases unwarranted; I assume due to background activity/caches, etc. Any thoughts?

[Jao vdL]

Try using an app like Omni disksweeper (highly recommended) or Grand Perspective to figure out what is taking all this space. Other is a catch all term (in monterey Apple replaced it with the term "system data") for anything it can't categorize.