My Lightroom catalogue is too big (500gb)

[dickvanduijn]

My Lightroom catalogue is really, really big. It takes more than half of my SSD hard disk of my iMac. It's 500gb. I already tried moving the whole catalogue to an external hard disk, but when i open Lightroom my latest pictures are all gone.

Can somebody please help me how i could make it smaller or move it without the loss of the latest pictures.

[dj_paige]

Do you mean the catalog file itself? Or do you mean your photos?

Assuming you mean the catalog file:

You can make it smaller via File-->Optimize Catalog. Other than that, don't try to make it smaller.

You can move the catalog file to another disk using your operating system. Put it in a newly created empty folder on the other disk. Double-click on it to open it.

Assuming you mean the photos:

Follow these isntructions to move the photos to a different disk: http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm Specifically, follow the instructions in "Part 2 — Updating Folder Location"

[Just Shoot Me]

The actual catalog file ends with .lrcat (That is .(DOT)LRCAT). I suspect the actual catalog file is not 500 GigaBytes but the whole folder where the LR catalog is stored could be that size. So look in the main, parent, folder your catalog is in and you should also find a folder called LightroomCatalogName Previews.lrdata. That is were LR stores the PREVIEW of the images you have imported. That complete folder, with many many Subfolder, can take up a lot of hard drive space. With LR CLOSED you can safely DELETE that Previews folder to free up disk space and the next time you start LR it will be recreated and Empty until you browse through your image files. Then LR will recreate standard preview for the image files you have displayed on screen.

[dickvanduijn]

Thank you very much. It were indeed these Previews.lrdata files taking so much space (over 500gb).

[Bob Somrak]

You can set how ofter to discard the 1:1 previews in Catalog Settings.  As you are probably not always looking at older photos at 1:1 on a regular basis this can save HD space.  I have mine set for 30 days and it is working fine.