freeing up space in lightroom?

[scottg92539156]

Hi I am a fairly busy commercial and corporate photographer.  I routinely edit 20K images per month in lightroom.  My system is to import, edit, export, deliver and backup.  I don't really need the lightroom catalog/collection system because I have all my unedited and finished work backup up on external hard drives and online.  My machine has 2TB of memory and is is filled with images in lightroom, I have about 30GB free and my machine is bogging down and I can't import any new work.  I can find tons of tutorials about how to organize and backup catalogs and collections, but not how to actually delete them.  I have a project to get done and I don't think I have time for an overnight or 24  hr backup project, I just want to delete a few dozen jobs and free up 300-400 gb to get back to work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks very much- Scott

[JP Hess]

There is no program, Photoshop or otherwise, that can edit or save raw or DNG files. That's why Photoshop needs the camera raw plug-in, and that's why Lightroom is needed. Whenever a raw file or a DNG file is sent to Photoshop it is first converted to an RGB file which must then be saved to an alternative file format. That's why Lightroom exists. And for those people who only use Photoshop, that's why the camera raw plug-in exists. Without the plug-in, Photoshop cannot do anything with raw or DNG files. They have to be converted to a format that Photoshop understands.