Safe to delete old Lr Catalog?

[SweeetJD]

I was cleaning out my computer today and noticed that the new Lightroom, which I just switched too, basically duplicated my photo library. The new Lr catalog is a little smaller than the old one.

My question is, is it safe to delete my old Lightroom Classic Catalog? Will I lose any photos? I'm a little aprehensive because the first time I attempted to use the new Lightroom, it kind of destroyed my catalog (but the photos were all safe fortunately). That was a while ago though, the new version seems fine.

[JohanElzenga]

Lightroom Classic has a catalog, which has a .lrcat extension. The help files have a .lrdata extension. Lightroom (CC) has a library, which has a .lrlibrary extension. You can delete the Lightroom Classic catalog and help files if you are no longer using Lightroom Classic. The catalog does not contain photos, just a reference to those photos, so deleting the catalog can never cause you to lose any images.

[99jon]

If the catalog conversion completed OK you should be safe in sticking with Lightroom Classic 9 (or did you migrate to the cloud version LR3?). Some users have experienced slowness of conversion or failure (fetching depth data from HEIC files) and I believe Adobe is investigating some sample catalogs.  

I always suggest waiting a few weeks or months. If everything works, and you have no intention of ever going back to v8.4.1 you can delete the catalog and previews relating to that version.

[SweeetJD]

Thanks. Maybe I need to do a new post, but the new Lr is also auto uploading my entire library, which is eating up my creative cloud storage very quickly. Can I disable this feature, or is that kind of a requirement of the new Lr?

[99jon]

By design any photo added to the cloud version or captured with a phone, is sent to the cloud as an original. This is also the case if you migrated to Lightroom. Images sync’d from a collection in Lr Classic are sent as smart previews and don’t use your storage allowance.

[JohanElzenga]

Did you recently change to Lightroom CC and migrated the Lightroom Classic catalog? Lightroom (CC) first copies all the images to its library, before it starts uploading. After the upload has finished it should delete them again, unless you set in the preferences that it should keep a local copy. So first check those preferences. I have seen reports that deleting the originals after upload may take some time.

[JohanElzenga]

I think you have to explain a bit more what you are doing, and whether that is what you want to do. You marked the answer of 99jon as correct, but he talks about the upgrade of Lightroom 8 to Lightroom 9. I assumed that you meant Lightroom (CC) with 'the new version' and Lightroom Classic with 'the old version', and what you are saying now seems to confirm that.

Is this what you want? Did you indeed switch from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom (CC)? If that is what you did and what you want to do, then you will have to accept that Lightroom (CC) stores originals in the cloud, so you will need at least the 1 TB plan. The 20 GB you get in the Photography plan is not adequate.

[SweeetJD]

No, I didn't mark it correct, I think he did. I just liked it. Yes, I am referring to Lightroom Classic to CC, I want to make sure I don't lose any photos if I delete the old catalog in favor of the new library. I'd also like to just use CC as a desktop editor, but I'm not sure if that's possible or if it's going to force cloud synchronization.

[JohanElzenga]

OK, I have unmarked it again. If you have migrated your catalog completely, and all the images show in Lightroom CC, then it's safe to delete the Lightroom Classic catalog and its helper files. As I said before, the catalog only contains links to the images and not the images themselves, so you can't lose them by deleting a catalog. You can use Lightroom CC in the same way as you did with Lightroom Classic, both are desktop applications. The only difference is where they store the originals.

[SweeetJD]

So CC keeps all originals in the new Library file, correct?

[JohanElzenga]

No, Lightroom stores the originals in the cloud. You can however save a local copy if you want to, either inside the library package or in some other place. That is an option in the preferences.

[SweeetJD]

Oh. Is that the default setting? It's generating a very large file, about 150 gb.

[JohanElzenga]

So check the preferences that it does not store a local copy.