Size of catalog file after upgrading to LR Classic

[The Keeper of the Garden]

After upgrading to LR Classic my catalog file shrunk from over 10 GB (around 90,000 photos) to 3.5 GB. As far as I can see, all edits and metadata have been converted completely and properly.

My question is: Is an enormous size reduction like this (from more than 10 GB to 3,5 GB) normal? 

[john beardsworth · Accepted solution]

There could be a few things. As part of the upgrade, they might be running the File > Optimize command which often reduces database size - it includes an SQL Vacuum command which clears up crud. But as part of the performance tuning they are now compressing the History data which can save a lot of space. It'll be a combination.

[The Keeper of the Garden]

Thank you. I was thinking along the same line. In previous versions of LR I used the Optimize Catalog command regularly but it never made any difference whatsoever regarding file size of the catalog. I hope other users who also notice the huge difference in file size of the LR catalog, will reply to this thread. I feel terribly lonely now. 😄

As far as performance of the new LR Classic is concerned and as far as I have tested it out until now (not very much), it seems to be a huge (and badly needed) improvement as it starts up much faster and the hardware acceleration features of my AMD graphics card which had been disabled by LR during one of the previous updates, are now enabled again by default. Nice.

[john beardsworth]

As a guide, I find that standard previews generate 4 times faster in "Classic" than in 2015.12, and 1:1 previews build about 2 1/2 times faster. The new embedded & sidecar workflow is also very good, especially with large numbers of new photos. I suspect folk will be concentrating on these improvements and not worrying too much about catalogue size

[Scott Masterton]

You are not alone. I found this thread because I was concerned about the same thing. My catalog was just over 2GB and is now at 1GB and I was concerned some data had gone missing in the upgrade process. So far I'm not aware of anything missing but I'm going to leave the old catalog there for a while just in case.

[The Keeper of the Garden]

Thank you, Scott!

So far I haven't noticed anything missing either. And luckily LR Classic now happily re-opens the Import dialog again when I insert a memory card in my reader. This feature was no longer working since I upgraded to macOS Sierra last year. Also, the funny "not-really-dead-but-totally-white pixel in the bottom left corner of the screen when working full-screen (on Mac computers) has now disappeared as well. The only issue I still have (since several years!) is that in the Print module the View Info overlay (showing the selected printer and paper size) no longer works. You can toggle that overlay by pressing the "i" key. I've reported this so many times over the last few years and it still is not fixed.

[JoeGold]

I have the same experience, upgraded my 4 catalogs from previous Lightroom CC 2016 to Lightroom CC Classic 7.0

Catalog files diminished approximately 30% to 50% of their former size, with the upgrade to Classic 7.0

Took me several hours going back and forth even to former Lightroom 5 and original Lightroom 2 with various catalogs to determine if there were images being excluded, but image count and functionality in Lightroom Classic CC 7.0 appears to be okay at preliminary glance.

On hold on phone now with Adobe customer service waiting for person to confirm this compression of Catalog files is correct.

[john beardsworth]

See my answer above - it is correct.

[johnrellis]

If you remain skeptical, see this article: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/whats-new-lightroom-classic-october-2017-70/. There are numerous postings in this forum about people observing catalog sizes shrink considerably in LR 7.  (My own catalogs shrank by almost 50%.)

[JoeGold]

Problem I could not solve in Adobe Classic CC, when I merged my previous LR catalogs, ALL my ratings were altered to GREEN - Single Star.  All 50,000 images ratings were altered in this way.  Years and thousands of hours of work was destroyed in terms of ratings.  All other metadata remained correct, Develop and adjustments all were correct, but clearly Adobe has a serious Bug in their code.