After migrating to Lightroom CC, can I delete the "Lightroom" folder on my hard drive?

[diklein]

I just migrated from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC. Is it safe to delete the extremely large "Lightroom" folder in Users/myUserAccount/Pictures? Or will that affect Lightroom CC?

[Akash Sharma]

Hi davidk70673976,

What size if the Lightroom folder you want to delete? If that is not taking a lot of storage and impacting the available space, I'd not recommend you to delete it. Lightroom Classic CC stores your catalog, backups, previews in this folder so if you are still using Lightroom Classic CC, keep this folder as it is.

Thanks,

Akash

[diklein]

It's ~50 GB. My goal is to transition completely to Lightroom CC. I assume once I'm confident in CC as a long-term solution, I can safely delete everything related to Classic?

[Akash Sharma · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the quick reply. Correct, Once you are confident using the new app, You may remove the other app and its contents from your computer. I'd recommend you to keep both the apps since Lightroom Classic is a full scale editing app and does not take much space to impact your total storage. See Go from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom CC |

Thanks,

Akash

[diklein]

Oh so I can delete the photos from my hard drive, but leave the application for its advanced editing features.

[JP Hess]

You can do that. But if you delete all your photos from your hard drive having Lightroom Classic CC installed isn't going to do you any good because it can't access just images that are only in the cloud. My advice to you would be to make sure you want to transition fully to Lightroom CC before you get rid of everything on your computer. However, the choice is yours.

[SteddyShots]

If you want use both apps, for the power of Classic but syncing with mobile of LR Cloud, you would want to do the opposite. Keep using LR Classic, set all folders to sync, and then use LR Cloud at your leasure as it will download smart screenshots or originals if desired. Just make sure anytime you import you import into classic. Now you get the best of both worlds. Folders from LRC don't sync with LR Cloud though so you have to manually recreate those and faces don't sync so you have to do face tagging in both. So if you don't need LR Classic features then go all in with LR Cloud.

If you do the other way of LR Cloud as primary app and LR Classic is secondary one, then you will run into many more troubles. The gap between LR Cloud and Classic lessens more each year. But still several items notably no plugin support.

But to answer your question, yes, once you use the LR Cloud Migrate feature, after you can delete you original Lightroom folder. LR Cloud will download smart previews into it's own spot, and if you enable download originals in settings, you can choose where to download those, make sure not same place as where LRC originals are.