How to add photos to catalog without it having to duplicate all my thousands of photos?

[matthewuscenes]

Just signed up for CC 1TB. I have maybe 500GB of photos on my hard drive. I have tried adding them to the LR catalog, but it says I don't have enough space on my drive. I don't need the photos to be duplicated.

Is it possible to not have the photos all duplicated? Or do I need to add a folder to the catalog and then delete it once it has made the duplicates? Or is there a way to just add my photos to the cloud? I have searched high and low for an answer but can't find this issue.

It makes sense that in future I will plug my SD card in and import those photos, then delete the SD card, hence me wondering if I need to add them in batches my hard drive can handle duplicates with. But I am new to this and don't want to just delete all my many thousands of photos from their current location unless I know they will be safe.

Any suggestions will be most appreciated. Thanks.

[Sahil.Chawla]

Hi there,

Could you please let us know the exact version of Lightroom you're working on by going to Help > System Info?

Also, Before Lightroom CC can import your photos and videos, it copies them to a new location on your local system. Over time, as they are backed up to the cloud, Lightroom CC may remove these large, original files and replace them with smaller smart previews to save disk space. However, this initial copy operation can require a lot of space.

If you see this error, you may want to direct Lightroom CC to store original files on a separate drive.

1. In Lightroom CC, go to Edit > Preferences (Windows) or Lightroom CC > Preferences (Mac).
2. Choose the Local Storage panel. Now, click Change Location to select a drive with at least the amount of free space recommended in the above error message.

Regards,
Sahil

[matthewuscenes]

I installed Lightroom CC last night, so I have the newest version: Lightroom CC version: 2.2 [ 20190204-1600-e7ae188 ] (Feb  4 2019)

From what you say the copies may or may not be deleted when synced in the Cloud, whereas Theresa says they will be deleted once synced. As there are some photos in the Lightroom folder from yesterday and it isn't syncing I will assume you are correct.

There is no point me having 2 copies of each file. Therefore, should I delete the Lightroom folder's images once synced, or will that delete all my images from the Cloud? Or should I delete all my original photo folders? I am scared of losing all my photos so I don't want to delete them all by accident.

Thanks Sahil.

[Theresa J · Accepted solution]

You can delete the original photos without having any impact of the ones in the Cloud.

In LrCC go to the preferences and make sure the option to “store local copies“ is turned off. This creates the duplicate sent that is synced with the cloud. Next you can clear the cache to remove any copies that are there.

Some users leave the copies because it allows them to work while offline.

It’s a good idea to make a backup copy of everything before you start deleting.

[matthewuscenes]

Thank you, big help.

Yeah I just realised how it is nice to have copies on a hard drive too as RAW and JPG take ages to load on my tablet and after flicking through about 5 images I think it overloaded it and Lightroom Android crashed. So I will keep the originals and do what you said. Hopefully it was just so slow today on mobile, otherwise it is back to Google Photos, I couldn't resist going back to that today as it downloads faster. I only use it for JPGs though. Will go to the Android forum now and see if it needs to download every photos whilst browsing.

[Theresa J]

This happens because Lr temporarily copies your images to a new location while uploading them and syncing to the cloud. You could import your photos in smaller batches. This would be an easy workaround. After a set of the images are uploaded and synced, the temporary copy will be deleted.

This is the workflow I recommend even when storage space isn’t an issue because you can create albums and organize your photos as you import them.

[matthewuscenes]

I suspected that may be it, thank you Theresa. I shall upload them in batches.