LR for Mac storage location for Previews.

[Darrall]

I have a Mac Studio M1 running Sonoma and several external SSDs.

I am in the process of leaving LR Classic and using LR for Mac exclusively. I have dragged across all my photos from Classic to albums in LRfM so that I now have all my edited originals in the Adobe cloud (635GB) as well as originals in an external SSD.

I am dismayed to find that previews are kept in the PICTURES folder in Lightroom Library.lrlibrary. This is now running at 250GB. I simply do not have enough room on my home drive for this! Yet LRfM does not give me any options to keep this library on an external SSD! How can I force LRfM to allow me to keep previews externally, since without this option I will be unable to add any new photos at all.

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from cc desktop">

[Ian Lyons]

@Darrall 

I've moved your post to the Lightroom Ecosystem forum as you're more likely to get an answer therer than in the Lightroom Classic forum.

[marie_6853]

I had a similar issue with my setup—my SSDs are maxed out, and it got to the point where managing space became a full-time job. I found a post about how to manage disk space on a Mac, which was super helpful for getting things under control.

[marie_6853]

Also, guys, you can check it out here: https://www.iboostup.com/blog/managing_mac_storage – it gave me a few tips on cleaning up system files without messing things up. I also moved a bunch of my photos to an external SSD, but for some reason, Lightroom didn’t give me an easy way to move the previews.

[Nadeem28230335k4xr]

Your library seems way too big.  I have all my images in the cloud as well (though its only about 150GB worth).  My Lightroom library is only 2.5GB.

[selondon]

@Darrall  What are you settings in Preferences / Cache?

Have you got Smart Previews stored locally and can you reduce your Cache limit?