Lightroom folder tidy up - what can I safely delete?

[davidh45184075]

Hi, I am trying to save space and remove unneeded files on my Mac M1.

I have a large catalogue of over 200k images close to 5TB. Over the years I think I have accumulated more LR files than I need.  Is it safe to delete all LR files in this screenshot except 2-2-v12? This is the only catalogue I. use and want to retain.

I retain Settings and backup folders of course. I marked the files I think I can delete in red, and the ones I must keep in green.  Please can someone advise if this is a good plan? When deleting do I just move to trash when LR itself is shut down?

Also, my Previews cache is 221GB - what options do I have to reduce its size? 

Thanks, David

[richardplondon · Accepted solution]

First, I suggest it's a good policy to direct your Catalog backups to a different physical drive, if possible, than the one where your working Catalog lives. Mitigated if you are backing up this drive elsewhere on a very frequent schedule.

So far as the different Catalog versions, you appear to have five of those (".lrcat" file extension). Assuming "Lightroom Catalog-2-2-v12" is your current one, then you can safely remove "Lightroom Catalog.lrcat" as well as the others you have marked red.

So far as previews - you can set a shorter retention period for 1:1 previews and that might make a difference. Depending on how you use the image library you may also be able to reduce the size of standard previews that are made. If you are happy to manage images initially in Library just from an embedded thumbnail of the photo, and perhaps use Develop for assessing them in detail, then there may be no need for large previews to be routinely generated in the first place. They will still get made for given photos that you do zoom into within Library. But these previews are not relevant to Develop or relied on for anything except convenience. So you could simply delete the entire previews cache and that plus new content will get re-made, but only as the specific need arises. Any deletion, though, it's good to have a safety disk backup first; or at the very least, employ the Recycle bin / trash as a backstop rather than bypassing this.

An older version Catalog (or  a support file / folder belonging to that same Catalog) that you do not have currently open, can be safely deleted from disk regardless of whether the LrC application is running or not.