Recommendations for newbie on LR photo saving location

[idontdrinkcoffee]

Hello all, I've been using Lightroom on a Mac at a limited capacity (only to make basic adjustments to brightness, colour, shadows etc.) for a number of years. I'm an amateur and I've never had training on how to use it and found hour-long youtube videos a little hard to follow (as the versions and terminology always appear a little different to what I see on my screen). I only use it out of my own interest in my personal time.

Anyway - my photo library/catalogue is now bloated to 1TB+ and it's really eating into my computer hard drive space. May I seek some advice from the experienced users as to:

1. should I ask LR to store the original photos on an external harddrive? I suppose this means I will need to plug in that particular external harddrive whenever I want to work on Lighroom. As I'm running out of space on my internal harddrive, I've just asked it to migrate it to my external harddrive (as a stop-gap) which I've been using for long term storage of images. Not sure if this is a good idea - but I'll need time to acquire another harddrive (if necessary) for storage of LR catalogue/library. 

2. I actually organise my photos from different cameras into a folder system of my own saved into a few harddrives (in duplicate) by year, and then a folder starting with the YYYY-MM-DD which stores my original RAW and JPEGS and an "edit" subfolder within each of the folders to save processed images as JPEGs. What I've just realised is that whenever I add photos to the albums in LR, it is making a copy of the originals, which means it is duplicating all of the images that I add to LR. I've amassed upwards of 15TB of photos (perhaps not a lot for some of you), and while I do not intend to add them all to LR for processing, the duplication will only be an increasing issue as time goes on. Is there anything I can do to avoid this while keeping my existing folder system which I keep for all photos?

3. As the storage which comes with the basic LR CC is only a number of GB, there is no way that the library/catalogue will fully upload to the cloud and I've paused sync-ing the day I subscribed to LR. Surely most people will have more images than what is included in the basic subscription. Am I using (I guess I'm not actually even "using" the cloud feature) this wrong? 

Thank you very much. 

[JP Hess]

If you are really trying to manage 15 TB of images with Lightroom (NOT Lightroom Classic) then you have the choice of paying for several terabytes of extra cloud storage or only working with a small portion of your image collection. In my opinion, a much better choice for you with that many images would be to use Lightroom Classic and several external hard drives. The catalog could remain on the internal hard drive, with images spread across as many external hard drives as necessary.